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Everything feels different today. It may be because we started the liturgy with the Great Litany. Sometimes when we’re not expecting the liturgy to be any different than it was last week and we come to Church expecting that, then I think it’s hard to hear what makes the difference. It’s all a bit unsettling. But it’s supposed to be.
We have begun a forty-day journey of Lent. Immediately we are reminded that something is different when we hear the words of Luke, telling us that Jesus was led by Spirit into the wilderness for a forty day adventure.

Maybe calling it an adventure is wrong. It certainly was a journey. And Jesus was led to undertake it by the very Spirit of God. That part might surprise you because it leaves me with a sense that Jesus may not have necessarily been looking forward to this extended time dealing literally with his demons. Or if not his demons, it certainly becomes clear that the evil one is present with Jesus. Not only is the evil one present, but the evil one seems to have an agenda that Jesus faces head on.
Remember Jesus is equips himself for the temptations that he will face with fasting and prayer. Fascinatingly enough, if we would have been able to tell Jesus he needs to be prepared for what will be a harrowing encounter with the very essence of evil, I am not sure we would have told him that he needed to fast for forty days and nights. We would probably have told him to get ready to pray but I am not sure we would have any hope that power to overcome the evil could be found in both prayer and fasting. Perhaps we need to look closer at both spiritual disciplines when we face the struggles in our own journeys.

But I don’t want to get sidetracked here. There is much revealed in these few verses and when we unpack them, much can be learned about our own struggles and what this all means to those of us who face temptations not dissimilar to the ones Jesus faced.

When Jesus emerges from this time in the wilderness, he will return to Galilee in a way that is quite different than how he began this adventure. Luke tells us that he returns “in the power of the Spirit.” Through this encounter with the evil one, Jesus succeeds with true power and reveals, through each of the three trials he faces, where true power is found: Jesus power, the power of evil and ultimately God’s. Let’s look closely at the three temptations.

In the first of these three trials, the evil one suggests to Jesus that if he is truly the son of God, he ought to be able to turn a stone into bread. This is quite frankly brilliant, given the fact that Jesus had been fasting from food for some time and he is hungry. Jesus responds to this trial by basically reminding all who would listen that a life is more than cravings. It seems quite natural that Jesus would use his divine power to take care of his personal needs and eating doesn’t seem like a sin or anything. But lets scratch under the surface.

Remember that the emperor Augustus and his son Tiberius claimed to be the son of god. By claiming this title, they had the authority to have at their fingertips any resources, including food, that they needed or desired. They could get grain, obtain money from taxes and use military might if needed. They just had to speak, and those words had the power of life and death over anyone in the Empire. So, this means that if they had the power to turn a stone into bread to take care of their hunger, then, they would do that. But not so with Jesus. Pay attention, there’s a pattern quickly developing between the self-serving power of the leaders in the Empire compared to the self-emptying and humble power of Jesus.

Jesus quotes Hebrew Scriptures and helps us by saying that we, as humans are not totally responsible for our own well-being or even existence. In his quote he reminds us that there is much to learn from the Israelites who wandered in the wilderness for forty years. Despite not knowing what tomorrow would bring, God always provided. God provided manna for forty years and the pillar of cloud and fire guided them through the wilderness. There’s a lesson here for us, since we too live in uncertain times. When we are led by God’s Spirit, uncertain times do not overwhelm but remind us, as Jesus does in another place that “life is more than abundance of possessions.” Jesus is showing us, that we can confidently follow the Spirit into the unknown.

But this isn’t the end of things. The evil one then claims he can give Jesus’ power and fame over all the kingdoms of the world. The rub is that in order to receive such prestige, Jesus will have to worship him. Again, Jesus quotes from the Hebrew Scriptures and calls the evil one’s bluff. Fame and authority are clearly not some Jesus seeks. Jesus knows where true authority is found and it’s not in the worldly empires being offered by the evil one.

And now the third temptation arrives as the evil one quotes from the Psalms in an attempt to convince Jesus to throw himself down from the highest point of the Temple. Jesus is told that the angels will protect Jesus from harm and once again Jesus quotes from the Hebrew scriptures in response. Deuteronomy 6:16 that he quotes recalls when Yahweh provided water from a rock for the complaining Israelites. They had angered God (the Owner, the Lord, kurios) because according to Exodus 17:7 at Massah they queried “Is God among us or not?”

So the evil one is trying to get Jesus to put God on trial. Jesus’ response insinuates that the Scriptures should not be used to cast doubt on God’s presence with God’s people. They should not be used for a game of “gotcha” nor should they be recited to serve selfish interests. Instead, the Scriptures are reminders of God’s powerful presence with God’s people even in the wilderness. There the Spirit leads them to resist the allures of the Evil One and empire.
And so, we are left with knowing that Jesus not only overcame these trials but show us a way out as well. For we too are faced with false claims about where to find power, prestige and a sense of rising above all the challenges of life in the midst of uncertainty. But remember that Jesus would have none of the lies and twisted truths of the evil one. When Jesus heard the temptations, the promises were plausible, but they fail deep scrutiny. The evil one suggested “that if we want good things we must make sure we keep them to ourselves. Someone else might take some. But Noah’s ark is the sign that we can only be saved together. Those who refuse untidy and unpredictable intimacy, clinging to the right to control and manipulate, drown in the water which they cannot control. The water is the water of life, and life is the spirit that grows and flows and bears up the arc on its buoyant surface.” -Rosemary Haughton.
We could leave it here and probably be pretty good to go. But the problem is that not all of us struggle with the desire for power and prestige, or even the concern over whether or not God will provide. Our struggles are apropos to Lent since we have been asked to reflect on what the liturgy calls “manifold sins and wickedness.” Before we let go of this gospel and the temptations of Jesus, let’s take a quick look into what we tend to struggle with because of our misunderstanding of sin.
It’s difficult dealing with our sins because we have made sin into something that is primarily personal and pushed into a narrow category of moral impurity. Jesus saw it quite differently.
We struggle with the same issues the gnostics did in the early church. We tend to have a dualistic understanding of sin and righteousness, putting sin and evil on equal footing with love and goodness. They are not. Love wins. Eventually Love Wins because in the very essence of God is love. Our temptation is often one of judgement, separating those who are the inside from those who are on the outside. When we do this we end up “aloof, separate, or superior.” We stand up and against those who don’t measure up and feel pretty good about ourselves. Indeed it is a heady feeling putting ourselves on the inside and then feeling as if we can keep those we find living morally impure lives on the outside. But what if these feelings could change into compassion and forgiveness. Instead of counting sins as a moral failure, we take our focus off of that and enter into a different way of being “where grace and mercy allows us to let go, trust and love instead of paying back in kind.”

This is truly a transformation that can only take place when we learn to trust in God, even when things are in such flux and confusion. But ultimately when we face the truth that often we follow God for the benefits instead of the truth of love, forgiveness and grace that happen in us when we let go. We probably aren’t tempted to throw ourselves off the temple roof and see if angels will catch us but what if we stop caring about who’s in and who’s out and simply love. Love others completely without strings attached. If we do that, like Jesus, we will leave whatever wilderness we find ourselves in and find ourselves comforted and empowered to love.

We’re here. We’re at the end of yet another season. I have been here with you through much of the Season after Pentecost, Advent, Christmas and today the season of Epiphany comes to a close. That’s a lot of ground we have covered, and I cannot answer for you, but if someone asked me a question about whether or not the journey with you has changed me, I would certainly answer in the affirmative.  I expected it and it has happened.

That’s what happens when you travel with Jesus and a community, through the texts and try to look at them with fresh eyes. I suspect you’ve heard me say many times that it is hard to hear the scandal of the Gospel because we have heard the stories so many times. That seems to be a recurrent theme week after week. And now as we come to the end of the Epiphany season we have another Gospel story that has been heard so many times by us, that we sometimes fail to hear how radical it is. And how exciting.

When we saw the last Sunday of Advent come and go, we recaptured an earlier understanding of that day and called it Christ the King. Now at the end of Epiphany, we can find a couple of ways to refer to it. For some, especially Lutherans, this day is called Reformation Sunday and we genuflected in their direction with a couple of selections from the Hymnal that are certainly recognized as Lutheran, only because they are sung a lot in the Lutheran Church.  Today is also called Transfiguration Sunday, since the Gospel recounts the Transfiguration of Jesus. This is a bit confusing because August 6^th is the actual date set aside to remember the actual Transfiguration. Despite that, the Gospel, on each of the three years of the lectionary cycle, always concludes the season of the Epiphany with this same Gospel. I know this is a bit of Inside Baseball, but the reason it is always read on this Sunday, despite whatever year the Lectionary is in, is because Epiphany is the season of revealing the truth of who Jesus is. It sort of “sheds the light” on what we mean when we say that at Christmas, the incarnation takes place and God has become human, in the baby born in a manger. Immediately following that season, we enter Epiphany and here story after story, from the Baptism of the Lord, through the first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee, to the Sermon on the Mount, all of those stories revealing the implications of what happened on that first Christmas.  Lent begins next week as we enter 40 days of preparation for Easter, and the stories and the fasting and the praying and the confessing of sins, all of that is to help us ready our hearts for the amazing event of Easter. But lets not get ahead of ourselves as we draw this season to an end with a quick look at what happened when Jesus took his closest disciples: Peter, James and John to the top of a mountain. On that mountain, something incredible happens and it’s important to be in awe but not so much that we miss the point of that day.

We don’t know what the disciples were expecting that morning when Jesus came to them and told them they were going somewhere alone. It’s not a stretch to suggest that they probably didn’t ask Jesus to explain, since at this point, they had seen so much and were probably as confused as they were amazed. They were just going to where Jesus told them. None of the conversation they probably had before they headed out has been preserved for us. Again, it’s not taking too much artistic license to suggest that there was at least a brief conversation, especially when Jesus told them to get ready to go and forget about telling the other disciples, since they were going alone.

There have been many, many sermons and interpretations about what happened once they got to the mountain, and I am not sure I can come up with some fresh interpretation. I can put my personal spin on things without getting in front of the story. Let me just put it this way, they were pretty much clueless both before the events of that day unfolded, and clearly they weren’t any more clear afterwards, hardly even trying to interpret things.

Jesus tells them to follow him and to watch. All four arrive on what we now call the Mount of the Transfiguration, which was probably Mt. Ararat but the exact location isn’t that important to us. What happens on top of the mountain is. Jesus goes through what can best be called a transfiguration and seems to be glowing. Some preachers have called this an image of Jesus and how we will look after the resurrection but personally I think that is reading too much into the story. Regardless, Jesus is shining and after a quick glimpse, the three disciples notice that he is not alone. The text tells us that he is standing with Moses and Elijah. How they knew that is anyone’s guess. But again, don’t get caught up in the specifics lest you miss the point. I have always wondered how the disciples knew, but again the text tells us that Jesus was standing there with two other of the major icons of the Jewish faith. I suspect they must have been wearing name tags, and that’s how everyone knew who they were. I could be wrong though.

But the story doesn’t tread water but goes directly into what had to be an amazing story to retell later. The text says: “And while he [Jesus] was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white.” This where different commentators offer a variety of interpretations for what that meant but suffice it to say, it was odd at best and felt rather supernatural.  And then the three disciples saw something even strange: “Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him.” Like I said, I have not idea how they knew who Jesus was talking to but now we hear that they must have overheard the conversation because the text tells us: “They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.”

All this is good and frankly fascinating but even though they must have gotten up early and the trek up the mountain must have taken some effort to get there on time, we hear that “Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him.” I’m sure that was a nap they were happy they missed.

Perhaps they blamed it on a lack of sleep and they were just seeing a dream like apparition because obviously seeing isn’t believing. Notice that even though Moses, Elijah and Jesus are quickly noticed, it takes a voice from heaven to insure that they understand what this all means. “”This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”

God speaks. But it seems like the disciples force his hand, since they look on all that was unfolding before him and Peter gives that awkward response to Jesus about how good it is that they are there. At first blush, this seems like stating the obvious. Of course it’s good they are there. Look at what they get to see. But then Peter suggests that they stay there awhile…. Indeed he suggests pitching a tent so they can get comfortable and I suspect he was thinking that it might be a good place to catch 40 winks before they take off.

Let me be honest here. I have read that Moses was there because he represented the law, Elijah has an appearance because, after all he can stand in for all the prophets and of course Jesus is the representation of the new covenant but that seems like a lot of commentators have read back into the story something that the disciples probably didn’t even think about. Don’t get me wrong, maybe these commentators are correct but somehow that just seems too easy. In fact, I love the final comment in the Gospel today when we are told that when they descended the mountain no one said anything. They were quiet.

I like that because sometimes we talk too much and get too clever. Sometimes, to get to the essential teaching of Scripture, it’s helpful to know that sometimes words that are translated in a certain but not necessarily in the most accurate way. This is the case in verse 31, which in most translation indicates Jesus was getting ready to go to Jerusalem for his “departure.”

The word right there is actually not “departure” but instead it is “exodus.” Of course, the word exodus here is not found anywhere else in the gospels and so when I learned that, I got pretty interested.

So here’s where it get’s fascinating: Like Moses before him, Jesus is given an experience of God that is filled with God’s majesty. But just like Moses, even though they were both chosen they were not given a promise that it would be an easy exodus. We are reminded through the word exodus of plagues, blood, the death of first-born sons, and the unremitting recalcitrance of the oppressive power of the Egyptians.  

These connections of both Moses and Elijah remind us thatGod will deliver God’s people from slavery as often as God must do it. An exodus from under the power of any oppressor has a cost. Jesus must “set his face like a flint” to get to Jerusalem (9:51). The three disciples who will follow that road with him have seen the glory that awaits and find the path to Golgotha deeply confusing. Jesus’ exodus will deliver even from the power of death, not just death-dealing powers-that-be, but death itself. That cannot be clear to Peter, James, and John until after the resurrection.

One more word: although Peter, James, and John have this awe-some experience, the other nine follow Jesus on his exodus journey without that experience. We are probably, most of us, more like the nine who go along anyway, except that now the experience of hope beyond the difficulties of our journeys is also given to us.

Last week we heard the blessed and woes, what we call the Beatitudes.  This morning we hear a sort of Part 2 of what we began to hear last Sunday.  Jesus climbs a mountain and teaches. He actually sits down. Some have said that all rabbis teach when they sit but I don’t think that’s the case.  In fact, what we have preserved for us is probably not one teaching but several.  In a sense this teaching could be called “the greatest hits” of Jesus because they were originally part of a series of teachings.  But whatever it was, we hear that he sits down and his disciples draw near. I am confident that they had no idea how radical of a teaching Jesus was about to deliver. Nor did they have any idea how many have distanced themselves from these teachings over the years, or attempted to spiritualize them or find a loop hole in the middle of them.

It’s good to note that these teachings were not intended for those outside the movement Jesus was establishing. It was those on the inside, and it still is. Those who were the first hearers were those who had already left everything to follow this itinerant preacher from Galilee. They had left families, homes and occupations to follow Jesus.

At this point we are pretty confident that there were twelve disciples but at this point in the Gospel of Luke we have only recorded the call of four: Peter, James, Andrew and John. But the number of disciples is insignificant because the very fact that this has been saved for us indicates that the early church saw these teachings as significant and preserved them for later generations. They were important to this fledgling movement and continue to be so for those of us who seek to live more fully into the Jesus movement.

This is one of those times that we can get lost in the Gospel, even though we have heard it so many times. Or we can spiritualize it or make it into a self-help manual about how to be happy.  Frankly the worst I have heard done to this radical teaching was to make it a how-to guide on how to be happy.  Someone once called them the “Be happy attitudes.” That’s pretty cute but it misses the point.  So, let’s try an experiment that can be helpful when trying to recapture the essence of Jesus teaching.  I can’t always do this, but let’s try, if you can, tpo suspend your sense of time and place and pull up a rock to sit on… or a pile of leaves, whichever is more comfortable. Sit down and let this itinerant preacher from Galilee teach something that we all want: how is it that we can be blessed? Not just happy but truly experience the blessed life even though we live over two thousand years after Jesus showed us how we should live to experience a life described as “blessed.” So instead of a road map on how to find a happy life, the beatitudes point us toward a responsibility of living fully into who we were created to be, and that points us toward a responsibility to live in a specific way. Indeed, to live this way is to live a life well-lived. To ignore it is to waste the beauty of life that God intends for each of us.

So, as we look again from afar, indeed we are centuries from this moment recorded for us and Jesus sees the crowds and seems to know that they need to listen as carefully as his disciples.  to receive it. We don’t know a lot about the crowds but if we’ve paid attention we have read that by this time Jesus is becoming pretty well know. His fame, we are told, has spread throughout Syria. It’s interesting why this was happening. It’s not because they want a teacher to open up the door to a life well lived. Nor do they necessarily want a savior, though there was a significant expectation that a messiah would soon become. No they had heard about the healings, the miracles. They had heard that people were being set free and so the drawing card was the miracles and so there was a growing movement of people bringing those they knew who were struggling with illness, or had been born blind, were disabled and found themselves without hope. There were others who had friends and family members struggling spiritually, some they felt were possessed by demons. But it that was their primary reason for showing up to hear the Sermon on the Mount, they might have left disappointed because there was something more important than Jesus simply providing relief from physical and emotional challenges.  

So, with that as a background, lets swoop down from a thousand feet above to right on top of Jesus’ teaching. In a lot of ways, all this seems so beyond us. Can you imagine if you’re not familiar with these words? I can only think of one way to describe what Jesus is teaching: this is radical, loving stuff.  

We do not have recorded any conversations that were being held among those in the crowd but surely there were many. But we can make some educated guesses about what was said. If they had heard of all that he had done and showed up to see more of the same, many had to be disappointed. This isn’t what they had t have expected. It was almost like buying tickets to a concert and then arrive and find out there won’t be any of that.  It’s just some man teaching. There wasn’t even an opportunity for some Q and A. 

For us, we know that Jesus primary purpose in coming among us wasn’t to heal, cast out demons, raise the dead, give sight to the blind and enabled the lame to walk. He did all that but if that was his primary purpose for coming us, then he would have found another steep mountain, climbed it, spread out his arms and healed everyone on the earth.  That didn’t happen becuasue that is not why he came.  He came to bridge the gap between God and God’s creation. He came to show us that God is loving and desires to engage with us on a very deep, personal level. He came to start a movement that would reveal to the world that there is a different way to live, to love. He came to set us free to love and by doing so to point all toward the one who creates, sustains and redeems. He came to tell us that despite our best efforts, all our religious attempts to make things right between humanity and God always fails. That’s why the religious folks had the hardest time with him. They had established a thorough and complicated check list full of duties and obligations.  That won’t do, Jesus said. Nice try but religion ultimately ends up with the haves and have nots, those on the inside and those on the outside. 

We tend to take these teachings and make some sort of religious dogma out of them.  We hear Jesus say blessed are you when you do this and that, and we quietly whisper to ourselves: yes, I do that. Check. Yes, I am like that. Check.  And then we hit a difficult one that challenges us and say: well, this is impossible. I don’t even know anyone like that. 

Oh, it even gets worse. Sometimes we think we may know someone just like what Jesus described and think well, that’s them. They don’t have all the baggage of life that I do. Or maybe you’re like me and you think: well, if this is the job description of those who call themselves Christians, someone needs to introduce them to me because I have questions. I’m not sure I’ve seen many of these people.

Before I go any further, this needs to be said: be kind and gentle to yourselves. Most of come to church Sunday after Sunday pretty much beaten up by the world and those in it. You see, we tend to make even the teaching of the Beatitudes into some sort of litmus test and when we fall short, as we all do, we tend to be self-critical and disappointed. That’s not why Jesus taught these things to the original hearers and to us who follow in their footsteps. We need to hear these old words again: “we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Yes, indeed. But also hear these ancient words: “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” It might seem like a careful threading through both of these, but I believe it is in grasping the truth of that we can be set free. And when we find ourselves free, the gratitude alone creates in us a heart that can forgive and love the way Jesus calls us. We don’t end up disappointed and disillusioned but instead, if we will allow it, the love of God, freshly and openly experienced, will change us.

Although the Sermon on the Mount begins with the Beatitudes and the promises of comfort, it moves quickly and challenges that comfort. Jesus is not selling his disciples a false hope; he is veryhonest with them. In this same Gospel, he will tell these same disciples, and anyone else who claims that designation, “whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:38) and “if any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). As someone has said: “The cross is the narrow way. It is also the way to show love. No one said the path into the kingdom would be easy. But is it worthwhile? Absolutely, because it allows disciples to focus their love and their talents, to have better knowledge of self and better concepts of living within a community.” Levine, Amy-Jill. Sermon on the Mount (p. 119). Abingdon Press. Kindle Edition.

And that’s the key for us. Like so much in the Gospel, and in the teaching of Jesus it is very easy to make it into some sort of individualistic formula to make it to heaven, but as I have mentioned, that something that Jesus doesn’t focus on much. Jesus is telling his disciples, and by extension us, what it means to live in community. Or better, how to live in a community that makes a difference, indeed that changes the world. That’s why this is so important for us to look at, to examine. This kind of community ethic is what we, those of us here at Holy Comforter, are called to live into. You see in order to love our enemies as ourselves, we are called to love those with whom we do life. You know, the person sitting next to you, the kids in the youth group, those serving in the altar guild, the LEMs and acolytes and even that pesky deacon we call Bob.

But don’t give yourself a grade. Just take this teaching, the beatitudes to heart because the ironic thing is this: when we fail to live into such a loving ethic, God gives another opportunity and another one and another one. God doesn’t do this to punish us or to beat us up because, here we go again, we’ve failed. No, God gives us these opportunities to change us. When we stumble, we get up, shake off the dust from our pants, ask for forgiveness and start all over again.

I recently read this which is a great reminder about love:

Love is more than a feeling. Love is a form of sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life giving—a choice we make over and over again. If love is sweet labor, love can be taught, modeled, and practiced. This labor engages all our emotions: Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger is the force that protects that which is loved. And when we think we have reached our limit, wonder is the act that returns us to love. —Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

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Once upon a time, we all believed in God. In an earlier epoch, we believed in God (or gods) as effortlessly as we believed in the firm ground beneath our feet and the expanse of sky above our heads. An ancient Greek poet expressed it like this in a hymn to Zeus (later reappropriated by the apostle Paul): “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). For the ancients, the divine was as immanent as the air they breathed. But that was before everything was on fire. That was before the conflagration of world wars, before the skies over Auschwitz were darkened with human ash, before the ominous mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, before the world witnessed twin pillars of smoke rising into the September sky over Manhattan, before long-venerated institutions were engulfed in the flames of scandal, before the scorched-earth assault on Christianity by its cultured despisers. Today, it’s harder to believe, harder to hold on to faith, and nearly impossible to embrace religion with unjaded innocence. We live in a time when everything is on fire and the faith of millions is imperiled. Zahnd, Brian. When Everything’s on Fire . InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition

He is right: everything is on fire. Old assumptions no long hold sway. It like we’ve fallen down a rabbit hole and Alice in Wonderland is speaking in jabberwocky and we can’t make sense of it. All we know is that either things have changed around us or perhaps within us, or God has changed. I can tell you with all that is in me, that God remains the same. The issue is with us and the world around us.  

Our faith seems to be like that parking lot that Joni Mitchell sang about: “Don’t it always seem to go; That you don’t know what you’ve got ’Till it’s gone They paved paradise And put up a parking lot.” And it’s not doctrine that seems to be missed but the mystery, the transcendence, the sacred. Everything seems to be monetized and it’s a challenge to not get swept into all of that.

And into this context of our world today, we hear the Gospel. Luke tells us that: “Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God,” and so on. I want you to notice how the crowd yearned to hear Jesus preach. They, the gospel says, pressed in on him on every side. There is a sense of expectancy and hope in those words. People wanted to hear Jesus. They hoped to hear something that would give them hope. They lived among the hopeless. They were captive to Roman rule. Even their worship was controlled. They had felt that God was on their side, yet there was nothing present in their life to support such feelings. All evidence to the contrary, they still hoped. And Jesus stood in the breach between promises that they still clinged to and the reality of what they faced. 

Isn’t different for us, isn’t it? I wonder why. Sure, we’re living in a secular world that either looks to God as a sort of a celestial card dealer, doling out the good cards to a few but the rest of us seem to keep losing and drawing jokers rather than a winning hand. We’re here in church but the numbers are lower than those who will shop at Walmart today. Does one find hope at Walmart? Will one find salvation as a blue light special? How about the number of people who will watch the Superbowl today compared to those who will receive communion? If you were an alien from space and were taking notes, the church would probably be one of the last places where you would think people would come for hope. And yet, hope is what we offer.

The biblical scholar NT Wright wrote that “people often get upset when you teach them what is in the Bible rather than what they presume is in the Bible.” And that’s one of the reasons that people don’t show up to hear the Word of God and would prefer to simply stay home, warm up the queso and watch the pregame show. Indeed, if I could be so bold, if we water the Word of God down, I don’t blame them. I prefer to listen to Terry Bradshaw over some half-baked replica of the good news.

There is a benefit in growing older. I have seen and heard a lot. I have also learned much from the mistakes I have made a long the way. I once lightheartedly said that the name of one of the books I want to write will be called “The mistakes of Darrel Proffitt.” There’s a lot of truth in that because the more honest I am with both the failures and self-imposed limitations I placed on my ministry, the more I grow and trust in God. Ministry has more to do than the clever turning of a phrase in a sermon or a well-placed relevant joke inserted in just the right place to make people feel comfortable and willing to come back and listen for another week. There’s an old saying attributed to Jesus that I have heard most of my life but for a variety of reasons seemed hard to truly believe. Seek the truth and the truth will set you free. Truth seeking and truth proclaiming are the twin towers of effective ministry and Christian living. It seems so easy but yet it is so difficult.

I am thankful to hear the Gospel this morning and gives me courage and hope to speak the truth. Jesus said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.”

This sort of reminds me of what was said of Harry Truman during his barnstorming campaign from the back of a train. At one stop someone yelled “Give ‘em hell Harry.” It is said that he responded, “I only tell them the truth and it feels like hell.”

But not always.  It only feels like hell when the truth reveals that we have put something, or someone in the place where God only fulfills us. We get stuck, all the time, in a shame and guilt-based faith that seems to have been peddled to us from those from afar and those close by. But Walter Brueggemann suggests that there is a “credo of five adjectives” that continually recurs in the Hebrew Scriptures: This God that Israel—and Jesus—discovered is consistently seen to be “merciful, gracious, faithful, forgiving, and steadfast in love.” . Richard Rohr writes “When we get to the Risen Jesus, there is nothing to be afraid of in God. His very breath is identified with forgiveness and the Divine Shalom… If the Risen Jesus is the final revelation of the nature of the heart of God, then suddenly we live in a safe and lovely universe. But it is not that God has changed, or that the Hebrew God is a different God than the God of Jesus. It is that we are growing up as we move through the texts and deepen our experience. God does not change, but our readiness for such a God takes a long time to change. Stay with the text and with your inner life with God, and your capacity for God will increase and deepen.”Rohr, Richard. Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (p. 20). Franciscan Media. Kindle Edition.

And keep hungry, keep searching. What seems like judgment is simply a true statement.  Jesus concludes the gospel this morning by saying “Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. “Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. “Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.” 

If we ever get to the place where we think there is no where else to go, no place to grow, nothing to learn and no one else to love, woe to us. Again, Richard Rohr reminds us “Most of religion, historically, expected we would come to God by finding spiritual locations, precise rituals, or right words. Our correct behavior or morality would bring us to God, or God to us. Actually, almost everybody starts there—looking for the right maps, hoping to pass some kind of cosmic SAT test—the assumption being that if you get the right answers, God will like you. God’s love was always highly contingent, and the clever were assumed to be the winners. The Bible will not make transformation dependent on cleverness at all, but on one of God’s favorite and most effective hiding places: humility. Such “poverty of spirit,” Jesus says, is something we seem to lose as we grow into supposed adulthood (see Matthew 18:2–4; Mark 9:35–37). Rohr, Richard. Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (p. 23). Franciscan Media. Kindle Edition.

This is why Jesus says the kingdom cannot be inherited unless we are like little children: unburdened by how we think God ought to act and periodically upset when God loves the wrong kind of people and then calls us to follow where he is leading. I get it. It’s a challenge especially if we have grown up with a sense that God is a celestial kill joy who gives our love begrudgingly. But, be encouraged, our God is not like that. That’s why Jesus came to show us that God loves. God loves in such a messy way, stumbling through the corridors of our lives, seeking us to comfort, empower, and make us more like God.  And when you find yourself stumbling over the person next to you to love the stranger and the strange, then blessed are you.

In Jesus name.

It is easy for me to get lost in some of the metaphors that Jesus uses when he is either teaching or simply living. It’s all the sheep, the goats, the weddings and parties and even lakes of fire and gnashing teeth. I hear them and suddenly I find myself catapulting down a couple of metaphors myself, like rabbit holes and black holes. I keep getting lost in mustard seeds and fig trees. It’s important to understand that the world that Jesus lived in was overwhelmingly rural and agricultural. You, like me might need to step back from time to time so we don’t lose sight of the proverbial trees in the midst of the forest. 

To make things more complicated, Brian Zahnd reminds us that ‘Our age is no friend to faith, and the challenges we face are real. I hear the melancholy whispers of Galadriel at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings: “The world is changed: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.” Zahnd, Brian (2021-11-08T22:58:59). When Everything’s on Fire . InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.  

For me (and probably you), we need to be reminded from time to time what the issues are… what is it that Jesus came to do and how does that help me, not just in the sweet by and by, but also, maybe most especially in the here and now. And not for those living in a different time and place, but for us who live right here, right now.  I believe it helps us all to aska basic question that is easy to lose from time to time. “What was Jesus’ message? What was his mission? [We shouldn’t get too complicated here because] Quite simply it was to inaugurate and establish the kingdom of God. Everything Jesus ever did—his preaching, his parables, his miracles, his table practice of radical hospitality—was an announcement and enactment of the kingdom of God. Jesus called upon those who heard his gospel announcement of the arrival of the kingdom of God to believe the message, rethink their lives, and to be baptized as a public testimony that they now belonged to this new way of being the people of God. Jesus was not offering private or postmortem salvation—Jesus was offering salvation as being personally gathered into the kingdom of God. A close reading of the Gospels reveals that Jesus used the concepts of salvation and kingdom interchangeably. For example, when the disciples asked Jesus whether few would be saved, Jesus spoke of how many would “recline at table in the kingdom of God.” Salvation is best understood as a kind of belonging. To be saved is to belong to and participate in the kingdom of God—a kingdom where Jesus is King (Christ). This is why in his itinerant ministry Jesus called people in the towns of Galilee to band together and live out the kingdom of God in assemblies he called “church.” We should never forget that the church originated as Jesus’ own idea. The church was not an optional addendum to the mission of Jesus, but the very heart of it! The Christian life is not a solo project and it was never intended to be. Christianity is not primarily a set of privately held beliefs but a shared life. Nevertheless, the rise of Christianity as private pietism has obscured this truth. Beach, Joseph. Ordinary Church: A Long and Loving Look . Spello Press. Kindle Edition.

Any of that quiet pietism, which simply means making faith into a private expression of deep sentimental faith, which has little to do with fishing for people, goes out the window when one looks closely at today’s gospel.  At the most basic of levels, the calling of Peter to follow Jesus and to become a fisher of people, suggests that faith is more than simply saying the right prayers, confessing sin and making into heaven, even if its by the skin of your teeth. No. Following Jesus has very little to do with that and a whole lot of helping others know that there is a different, more vibrant way of living.

It does not take an artist’s leap of creativity to arrive at this truth: following Jesus to get to heaven has little or no connection to what Jesus proclaimed. If our faith in Jesus was simply to insure our eternal destiny in paradise, then the Romans would not have been so threatened by Jesus. Let the people believe whatever they want, as long as there  isn’t a threat to the Empire. But if these Christians overstep their boundaries and begin talking about systemic issues, then we may have a problem, the Romans thought. Indeed, at first the Romans looked at the communities that emerged after they attempted to destroy this movement by crucifying the leader of it, and thought, they’re not much of a threat. They were just a kind of subset of Judaism, they thought, which they seemed to have pretty much under control.

But it appears that this new community that Jesus began was committed to standing up and against the Empire. Evidently fishing for people meant standing up and against the power of the Empire. “Telling the story of Jesus’s crucifixion in an open way, and celebrating it, was an act of resistance to Rome. Jesus’s crucifixion was not unique but was duplicated over and over throughout the empire, and the stories of Jesus being tortured to death allied his story with those of hundreds of thousands similarly executed. Early Jesus groups dramatically described how their Anointed leader was crucified by Roman soldiers. They proclaimed openly that Jesus was an executed enemy of the state. Later Christians obscured Rome’s violence by highlighting Jesus being crucified to save people from their sins. Without being sidetracked by that later Christian doctrine, most communities of the Anointed of the first and second century publicly acknowledged the paradox that Rome’s defeat of Jesus the Anointed was actually Rome’s defeat. The stories of Jesus’s death would have produced sympathy for other victims of Roman violence. This is clear in the stories of his death in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, both of which describe Jesus being mocked as he was crucified and Jesus screaming out to God, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Mark 15:34; Matt. 27:46). The empathy in these stories is anti-Roman. Most of the stories of Jesus’s crucifixion also proclaimed that Jesus was vindicated and raised up by God. This claim would have been understood as an anti-Roman claim of victory over Roman violence.” Vearncombe, Erin; Scott, Brandon; Taussig, Hal; Westar Institute, The. After Jesus Before Christianity (pp. 42-43). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. And this was a threat to the power they possessed.

“The word translated as “gospel,” meaning “good news”, occurs 101 times in the New Testament across eighteen books. Good news is not a religious expression but means what it says. It is an expression that celebrates a joyful event as a sort of public statement or proclamation. Often in imperial accounts, good news is the birthday of the emperor. 

Two things help us understand good news in the ancient world. First, unlike so often in the contemporary United States, good news was not measured by the amount of money and property one had. Good news marked a significant event that changed the world, whether it was the birth of an emperor or the coming of the Anointed. Second, most of the members of these groups—perhaps two thousand people twenty years after Jesus’s death and maybe a total of twenty thousand fifty years later—were mostly peasants, day workers, the enslaved, and craftspeople. Although there were occasionally wealthy people in some groups, in many there were none.”Vearncombe, Erin; Scott, Brandon; Taussig, Hal; Westar Institute, The. After Jesus Before Christianity (p. 44- 45). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

These were the fish that Jesus told Peter, and the Church to go and fish, to bring the good news to them. What is this good news? The Empire tells us that happiness is found when you have everything together, you have the money to buy stuff, the health that keeps you from suffering and the good life, which, if you have watched the HBO series Succession (I can’t be the only one who has seen this series) only brings heartache and desperation. 

I want to reminds us all as I mentioned last week that the Gospel is most appealing to those who are on the outside, without privilege, status, or wealth. It becomes appealing to us when we come to the realization that not only should we identify to those who the world rejects but we, too, are outsiders. 

In a sort of ultimate topsy turvy way, God offers us entrance into this community when we let go of privilege and what may seem like something we earned and grasp it by letting go. Just think about it for a moment, this whole kingdom thing makes no sense to the satisfied, the comfortable, the well heeled, those who’s future is secured.  But for the downcast, the lowly, those who are not sure if they’ll survive the next catastrophe but they don’t have anything stored up in barns or an IRA, they are the ones Jesus addresses by saying, “You are the salt of the earth . . . the light for the world . . . Don’t fret about your life—what you’re going to eat or drink—or your body—what you’re going to wear . . . Take a look at the birds of the sky: they don’t . . . gather into barns . . . You are to seek God’s domain, and . . . justice first, and all these things will come to you as a bonus” (Matt. 5:13, 14; 6:25, 26, 33). This makes no sense to those of us who see the worse calamity to overcome a dip in the stock market indices. 

Fisher folk. That is what we are called to do and fish for those who fear that the good news is no where to be found. But you cannot fish if you do not see that our faith is more than a first class ticket to the hereafter. Unless we understand that focusing on heaven has made to many people to be so heavenly minded that they are not earthly good.

We live in a world that has made the most radical proclamation a rather tepid formula for the hereafter. I have been guilty of that and I suspect I am not alone. You see unless we risk identifying with the have nots, the rejected and despised, then we’ll just go fishing, not for people but just for the latest catch of red snapper, paired to the sweetest of wines, in a candle-lit bistro reserved only for those who have cushion in their money market accounts. But is that really the way to live? If only we could take ourselves out of the middle of our own self-created universe and see those who God abides with: the rejected; the sad and lonely; those who have lost track of the number of times they have simply been ignored.

Drink deeply this morning. Hear Jesus say “this is my body, this is my blood,” and then leave this place renewed, refreshed and committed to do more than rest on the hope of a future with God. Because unless we recognize God in the rejected and despised, we will never recognize him on a throne.

If we were to compile a list of Jesus’ greatest hits, today’s gospel would certainly need to be considered for us to include. We have this scene etched in our minds: Jesus stands up and unrolls the scroll, reads from Isaiah and then sits down. At least I have it etched in my mind. It’s really a remarkable scene that dramatically has Jesus, returning to his hometown, going to his childhood synagogue on the sabbath. Luke tells us that going to a synagogue on the Sabbath was what Jesus typically did. All of that is important, letting us know that Jesus was a faithful Jew and worshipping in the synagogue was, what Luke called “a habit.” All that is important, but arguably, the most important thing that happens in this scene is what Jesus does after he reads from Isaiah.

To understand the significance, we have to take a deep dive into the reading that Jesus share with his congregation. First, let me remind you what Jesus has been up to now that Luke in is his fourth chapter. We have witnessed a lot after the birth narrative of Chapter 2. If you are reading Luke’s gospel, you have seen the Holy Spirit descend on Jesus at his baptism in Chapter 3 and then, the same Holy Spirit leads him into the wilderness where he is tempted by the devil for 40 days and nights. At this point, Jesus is about to launch into his public ministry and does so by returning to his home country of Galilee. After he reads from the prophet Isaiah, we are told that he was praised by everyone. I wonder if they just weren’t paying any better attention than we are.

It’s interesting Jesus chose to start his public ministry in this way. He’s back home, in Nazareth, surrounded by those who knew him as a child and knows his family. Clearly those who oversaw the synagogue were honoring Jesus by asking him to read and reflect on the Sabbath. It’s not a stretch to think that Jesus is already becoming known as a great teacher, so what better way to honor him than to invite to talk on the Sabbath.

In a lot of ways, this is an extremely important event because these are the first words Jesus’ speaks about his public ministry. I guess you could call this Jesus inauguration speech or at least one he had thought through For the next three years Jesus would do a lot of teaching, preaching, healing, exorcisms, and even raising the dead. With that in mind, his first opportunity to speak is so significant, we need to pay close attention. If this were a movie, we’d hush everyone around us so that we could listen carefully, because if we wanted to know the context of Jesus’ ministry, then this would be it. So, he chooses the prophet Isaiah to begin it all. He reads: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Then Jesus give a one sentence interpretation: “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.

So what is that we hear? Jesus says that the Spirit anoints him, sends him to do a handful of things: bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, hope for the oppressed and lastly, he says that the Holy Spirit has anointed him to “proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” To give the cliff notes version: Jesus’ ministry is to bring good news to everyone who is bound up, pressed down, broken in spirit, impoverished, imprisoned and so downtrodden that they have forgotten what good news is.

There is a temptation for some to spiritualize all this. I think that temptation is there because if what Jesus says is taken literally and physically, then the Gospel becomes a threat to those in power. Frankly Mary’s Magnificat was threat enough but if Jesus meant these words to be taken as he spoke them, then the Gospel becomes a radical rejoinder to all who prefer it remain a safe, Sunday school-like proclamation.

In fact the word translated poor in this reading has to do with both economic status and those things that affected one’s status in the first century’s world- gender, genealogy, education, occupation, health an disability and even religion. Hold here, this is radical stuff. If Jesus really meant what he said, and he certainly did, his ministry was directed to outsiders, those who sat on the margins of society. If I may be so bold as to paraphrase Jesus, it would go something like this” “I (Jesus) have come not for the satisfied and comfortable. I have come to let you know that I am here for those who the world has rejected. You are the ones who I seek to offer Go’s grace and mercy. Which should lead us all to identify with all those the world rejects or places as beyond the reach of God’s grace and mercy.

We could leave this right here and leave a bit shaken because this runs contrary to what we have been told. I read on social media and hear from many prosperity preachers that God’s favor is found I material wealth and in lives where everything is put together pretty well. That sells books and many people will send money to hear such things. But that’s not what Jesus preaches here.

Oh it gets a bit more tangled. We might be able to find some way to come to terms with all of this is Jesus would have just left it here. But he makes a point that he is called to “proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” A cursory reading of this may lead us to believe that this just means that God is simply favoring the world by send Jesus. That this much more profound than that.

Jesus is referencing something that isn’t from Isaiah but rather, he is taking it from Leviticus. It is here that God commands something called the “Year of Jubilee.” This was a year in which indentured servants were to be released, debts foreign and land and property returned to families who had either leased or sold them. It was a year that Biblical scholars call “radical restoration.” There is not a lot of evidence that this was ever practiced in ancient Israel. It had become known as a promise that would someday happen…. Some day in the future.

It’s not a stretch to see who this promise of “radical restoration” would appeal to… the closest thing I could come up with would be if suddenly we heard that all of us with a mortgage suddenly found it paid, those with college loans, no longer in debt. I am pretty sure that there would be a lot of people happy and a lot of people not I wonder which side of the divide I would be on. Perhaps it was not good news to all who heard Jesus proclaim the Year of Jubilee was upon them, because as we will hear next week, the praise will quickly turn to rage and murderous intent. Oh how things have NOT changed. Good news is seen differently from those who are up to their eyeballs with debt and discomfort.

But it’s not difficult to see why there would be different reactions. The “Year of the Lord’s Favor” isn’t seen in the same way by all, especially when you get down into the weeds, close to where it would all play out. Indeed, who wants all this if your life is comfortable. And what would we do when we are faced with dealing with those who don’t deserve such radical restoration?

What if they were to show up here? I’m wondering if we would finds ways to exclude these free loaders. After all, we worked hard to get ours, why should they be just forgiven and allowed to move forward without the burden that they surely thrust upon themselves? Maybe we should go back and spiritualize this gospel so that we can go back to our comfortable lives and keep those on the margins at bay?

I think we have to admit to that temptation if we are to leave this gospel and return to regularly scheduled programs. But if we risk listening and hearing the call that Jesus sends us to join him in his ministry our lives will change. They won’t reflect the values we may have worked so hard to maintain in our lives, but will rather become more like radical gospel living followers of Jesus. Or perhaps we can just hope that this isn’t meant for us, it’ll play out some time in the future. Far away from us. It’s more comfortable to make this all a future hope than a present reality. But if that’s where we find ourselves, there is an unfortunate reality that we see in this mornings Gospel. Jesus proclaims that today this scripture is fulfilled in him. We cannot project this all into a future hope. Jesus has eliminated that possibility.

Following Jesus seems like an easy thing to do. Pray the sinner’s prayer, get yourself into that book of life, look forward to going to heaven and then we can just keep rejecting people and making sure the margins hold. Or we can do something radical. We can actually follow Jesus by living and loving and forgiving like he calls us to live.

In Jesus name.

We are so familiar with the scene in today’s gospel that we often skim over the essence of what Jesus proclaims. We have the scene etched in our minds: Jesus stands up and unrolls the scroll, reads from Isaiah and then sits down. At least I have it etched in my mind.  It’s really a remarkable scene that dramatically has Jesus, returning to his hometown, going to his childhood synagogue on the sabbath. Luke tells us that going to a synagogue on the Sabbath was what Jesus typically did. All of that is important, letting us know that Jesus was a faithful Jew and worshipping in the synagogue was, what Luke called “a habit.” All of that is important, but arguably, the most important thing that happens in this scene is what Jesus does after reading from Isaiah.

To understand the significance we have to take a deep dive into the reading that Jesus shares with the congregation.

First, let me remind you what Jesus has been up to now that Luke is in his fourth chapter. We have witnessed a lot after the birth narrative of Chapter 2. If you were reading Luke’s gospel, you have seen the Holy Spirit descend on Jesus at his Baptism in Chapter 3 and then the same Holy Spirit leading him into the wilderness where he is tempted by the devil for 40 days and nights. At this point, Jesus is about to launch into his public ministry and does so by returning to his home country of Galilee. After he reads from the prophet Isaiah, we are told that he was praised by everyone. I wonder if they weren’t paying any better attention than we are.

It’s interesting Jesus chose to start his public ministry in this way. He’s back home, in Nazareth, surrounded by those who knew him as a child and knows his family. Clearly those who oversaw the synagogue were honoring Jesus by asking him to read and reflect on Isaiah. It’s not a stretch to think that Jesus is already becoming known as a great teacher, so what better way to honor him than to invite him to talk on the Sabbath?

In a lot of ways, this is an extremely important event because these are the first words Jesus’ speaks about his public ministry. I guess you could call this Jesus inauguration speech or at least one that he had thought through.  For the next three years Jesus would do a lot of teaching, preaching, healing, exorcisms, and even raising the dead. With that in mind, this first opportunity to speak is so significant, we need to pay close attention. If this were a movie, we’d hush everyone around us so that we could listen carefully, because if we wanted to know the context of Jesus’ ministry, then this would be it. So, he chooses the prophet Isaiah to begin it all. He reads: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (a conflation of Isaiah 61:1-2a and 58:6). Then Jesus gives a one-sentence interpretation: “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

So, what is it that we hear? Jesus says that the Spirit anoints him, sends him, to do a handful of things: bring good news to poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, hope for the oppressed and lastly, he says that the Holy Spirit has anointed him “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” To give you the cliff notes version: Jesus’ ministry is to bring good news to everyone who is bound up, pressed down, broken in spirit, impoverished, imprisoned, and so downtrodden that they have forgotten what good news is.

There is a temptation for some to spiritualize all this. I think that temptation is there because if what Jesus says is taken literally and physically, then the Gospel becomes a threat to those in power.  Frankly, Mary’s Magnificat was threat enough but if Jesus meant these words to be taken as he spoke them, then the Gospel becomes a radical enjoinder to all who prefer it remain a safe, Sunday school like proclamation.

In fact the word translated “poor” in this reading has to do with both economic status and those things that affected ones status in the first century’s world- gender, genealolgy, education, occupation, health and disability and even religion. Hold on here, this is radical stuff. If Jesus really meant what he said, and he certainly did, his ministry was directed to outsiders, those who sat on the margins of society. If I may be so bold as to paraphrase Jesus, it would go something like this: “I (Jesus) have come not for the satisfied and comfortable. I have come to let you know that I am here for those who the world has rejected. You are the ones who I seek to offer God’s grace and mercy. Which should lead us all to identify with all those the world rejects or places as beyond the reach of God’s grace and mercy.

We could leave this right here and leave a bit shaken because this runs contrary to what we have been told. I read on social media and hear from many prosperity preachers that God’s favor is found in material wealth and in lives where everything is put together pretty well. That sells books and many people will send money to hear such things. But that’s not what Jesus preaches here.

Oh it gets a bit more tangled. We might be able to find some way to come to terms with all of this if Jesus would have just left it here.  But he makes a point that he is called to “proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” A cursory read of this may lead you to believe that this just means that God is simply favoring the world by sending Jesus. But this is much more profound than that.

Jesus is referencing something that isn’t from Isaiah but rather, he is taking it from Leviticus 25. It is here that God commands something called “The Year of Jubilee.” This was a year in which indentured servants were to be released, debts forgiven and land and property returned to families who had either leased or sold them. It was a year that Biblical scholars call “radical restoration.” There is little evidence that this was ever practiced in ancient Israel. It had become known as a promise that would someday happen….someday in the future. 

It’s not a stretch to see who this promise of radical restoration would appeal to…. The closest thing I cold come up with would be if suddenly we heard that all of us with a mortgage suddenly found it paid, those with college loans, no longer in debt. I am pretty sure that there would be a lot of people happy and a lot of people not. I wonder which side of that divide I would be on. Perhaps it was not good news to all who heard Jesus proclaim the Year of Jubilee was upon them, because as we will hear next week, the praise of Jesus will quickly turn to rage and murderous intent. Oh how things have not changed.  Good news is seen differently from those who find life easy and comfortable compared to those who are up to their eyeballs with debt discomfort. 

But it’s not difficult to see why there would be different reactions. The “year of the Lord’s favor” isn’t seen in the same way by all, especially when you get down into the grass, close to where it would all play out. Indeed, who wants all this if your life is comfortable. And what would we do when we are faced with dealing with those who don’t deserve such radical restoration. What if they were to show up here? I’m wondering if we would find ways to exclude these free loaders. After all, we worked hard to get ours, why should they be just “forgiven” and allowed to move forward without the burden that they surely thrust upon themselves? Maybe we should just go back and spiritualize this gospel so that we can go back to our comfortable lives and keep those on the margins at bay.

I think we have to admit to that temptation if we are to leave this gospel and return to our regularly scheduled programs. But if we risk listening and hearing the call that Jesus sends us to join him in his ministry, our lives will change. They won’t reflect the values we may have worked so hard to maintain in our lives, but will rather become more like radical gospel living followers of Jesus. Or perhaps we can just hope that this isn’t meant for us, it’ll play out some time later. It’s more comfortable to make all this a future hope than a present reality. But if that’s where we find ourselves, there is an unfortunate reality that we see in this mornings Gospel. Jesus proclaims that today this scripture is fulfilled in him. We cannot project this all into a future hope. Jesus has eliminated that possibility.

Following Jesus seems like an easy thing to do. Pray the sinner’s prayer, get yourself into that book of life, look forward to going to heaven and then we can just keep rejecting people and making sure the margins hold. Or we can do something radical. We can actually follow Jesus by living like he calls us to live.

I often wonder what it would be like if we had someone show up at Church on Sundays, sit in the back, and just watch. In my imagination this person would have little or no understanding of not only what we are doing but would be unfamiliar with the words we read from the Gospel each Sunday. I suppose they would not have to be here too many Sundays before they came to understand that a person named Jesus was important. His name gets mention a lot and stories that he is in seem to make him out as unique.

There is more about Jesus than healings and miracles, but if you hadn’t heard much about him, those stories would certainly stand out. We don’t usually hear stories like that and when we do, they stand out. There are a lot of stories where Jesus shows up and helps those who are in drastic need- he feeds the hungry, gives sight to the poor, helps those who are paralyzed walk and even casts out demons from those possessed. We even have a story of Jesus raising someone from he dead. These stories all seem to have something in common, they address the suffering of people and restores them to the fullness of life, both physically and spiritually. 

But if are visitor was here today, they might be scratching their head after hearing the gospel. I know we don’t do this, but for our visitor, it would be easy to think that Jesus came to take care of issues that lead to desperate actions because so many of them are almost life-threatening. But this story has none of that. There is no crisis of illness or hunger. There isn’t a glimpse into a story that made lead to total and complete disaster. No, this one is very different from what they may have heard.

This story is a miracle but if you were new to all of this, it would surprise you. We are told that this one Jesus’ first miracle and it seems to be on a whole different level than subsequent ones. I guess what I am trying to say is that this miracle, his first one, seems so weird. 

Let’s take a close look at it. There’s a problem here but not one that would seem like it would take a divine intervention to overcome. Indeed, why even bother oneself with this. You heard it as well as I did. The wine ran out.  Did you hear that, they ran out of wine? This isn’t an existential crisis. No one was going to die. If one were to rank miracles, and I suspect we all do, this would fall under the category of “so what” or “couldn’t he have just gone to Spec’s and picked up a few bottles of wine? Really, what is the worst thing that could have happened if Jesus had intervened? They would have jus shut down the party early. No big deal. No one dies because of it. Sure, the hosts would have probably been embarrassed but other than that, we’re good. 

I can’t just leave us here because this odd, rather pedestrian sounding miracle is going to take on some more characteristics that may leave our guest scratching his or her head.

Jesus’ mom gets in on the act and, once again, we may be left with wondering what’s really going on. Before we start to unpack this, I have got to say this sounds so normal and mundane. Jesus goes to a party where the hosts forgot to make enough wine to last the entire party, are embarrassed that the wine of all things ran out, look to Jesus for help, finds Jesus’ mother stepping right into the middle of the scene, instead of stepping aside to let it resolve itself, thinks that Jesus can be of help. She tells her son to help and Jesus tells her to butt out.  The Gospel of the Lord.

No, it doesn’t stop yet. At first, it’s easy to read into the scene and interpret the brief conversation Jesus has with his mother. I know I do that. I can Jesus getting a bit worn out about the whole deal and rather rudely dresses down his mom. “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come” (John 2:4). Whoa. Wait. This  “hour” of which Jesus speaks perhaps refers to he event of his death, resurrection, and ascension to the Father. Or it could mean that Jesus isn’t quite ready for this all to start. If he intervenes, people will notice. If they notice, they will talk. If they talk, they will scheme. If they scheme, they will plot. And if they plot they will try to silence him. And the only way to silence him is to hand him over to the Romans. And if they do that, maybe the Romans will do away with him. I am not sure they would think crucifixion would be a mighty fine way to end all of this, but if Jesus stepped on enough toes, who knows? Maybe if he’d just wait, all of this wouldn’t start yet. With that in mind, I suggest that Jesus may have been look at both a clock and a calendar when Mary asked him to intervene. “Not yet Mom”, he may have been thinking.

Not only this but Jesus was about to begin his public ministry and there were plenty of things he had to deal with, like the calling of the disciples to follow him, a whole passel of struggling and sick people to address, a lot of teaching to do… Jesus had a lot on his plate. But hand to Mary, remember she’s Jesus mother and knows him better than anyone else. “Do whatever he tells you, “She tells the servants (John 2:5). She seems to know that despite Jesus’ response, he will do something.  

I wonder what she knew that led her to address him in such a way. It was almost she said to him, “you can do something, don’t overthink this, just help out.”

From reading the story, we don’t quite understand the significance of Mary’s request. We hear that there are six stone water jars and we know, with some interpretive skill that they each held 20-30 gallons each. So when one filled each with water, that Jesus is about to turn into wine, we get a total of 120-180 gallons of wine. Whoa.

But let’s keep going. We quickly learn that not only does this miracle results in copious amounts of wine but that it’s no Mogan David wine. Or Boones Farm. This is high quality, the best of Napa Valley or French wines. It is quality. Let me repeat what the chief steward said after taking a sip. “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk, but you have saved the good wine until now” (2:10). 

I am not going to comment on how inappropriate that custom was but it’s easy to get stuck here. Both the amount and the quality indicate that this was an extravagant miracle. Large amounts of high-quality wine.  Nice first miracle.

The story reveals to us that the chief steward is clueless about who it was that did what just happened. Jesus, as we know, is the responsible party but the chief steward doesn’t. We know, Mary knows, the servants know but that’s it.

One of the issues we face is that we lose sight of what is happening. I blame it on the wedding liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer but that’s just because I am an Episcopal priest. In that liturgy, the priest says that marriage is special because that is the place where Jesus performed his first miracle. That’s right but John, the Gospel writer might disagree.

John doesn’t call it a miracle. He calls it a sign. It’s the first of seven signs that John will write about. You know a sign isn’t a miracle; no signs point us to something beyond themselves. You know a stop sign is just a warning that the intersection straight ahead may have other cars waiting to go down the road or turn right in front of you. We are being alerted that something lies ahead of us so be alert. When Jesus changes the water into wine at this wedding in Cana of Galilee, we are being alerted to something more important than the wine itself, no matter how much was made or how good it was. This sign points us to the one who is the source of all life and joy. 

Biblical scholars tell us that images of wedding banquets appear frequently in scripture to point toward the restoration of Israel and when wine is mentioned, we are to be reminded that it is a symbol of joy and celebration. Not just any joy and celebration but the kind associated with salvation itself.  The prophet Amos speaks of the day when “the mountains shall drip sweet wine. and all the hills shall flow with it,” for example (Amos 9:13). Isaiah speaks of the feast that God will prepare for all peoples, “a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines … of well-aged wines strained clear” (Isaiah 25:6). The abundance of fine wine is a symbol of the abundance of joy that awaits not only Israel, but all peoples on the day of God’s salvation.

Our visitor sitting in the back may be a bit titillated by all this talk of wedding feasts and wine, but if I could sit next to our guest, I would whisper something in her ear. This story is a sign that in Jesus, life, joy and salvation have made their appearance and are not going anywhere. I would point her to the start of John’s Gospel in order to read that “in him was life, and that life was the light of all people” (1:4). And later in the Gospel, Jesus will tell us, “I have come that they might have life, and have it abundantly” (10:10).

You see along with our guests sitting in the back, we all need to know or be reminded that Jesus brings us abundant life which means a life that is more than just a white knuckle holding on of existence and survival. No, abundant life is to have a relationship with a God who loves us so much that he doesn’t know hat it means to stop giving. He gives and gives and loves and loves.

But just so our guest doesn’t excuse me of bait and switch, I would quickly add that this isn’t the same as a life of ease, comfort, and material possessions. It’s also not a life where suffering and sorrow are somehow magically erased. But it does mean a life where we can find abundant, extravagant grace that will sustain us and see us through. Because, you see, being in Christ means that we are joined together with the source of true life, which as it turns out, can only be described in the extravagant story of turning water into wine at a wedding feast in Cana of Galilee.

The following was preached by a guest and former member of Holy Comforter:

Recovery Sunday – January 2022

“

Recovery Sunday – January 2022

“3 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us”

Hello. My name is Drew and I’m an alcoholic.

That was the first scripture that I ever retained. I was around 30 years old, sitting in a pew at St Martin’s Episcopal Church. I was just now trying again to get sober. What was still left of my personal relationships, career, and health was teetering on further destruction. It was the first time I had been to church in a while, and even longer since I had been in church without a hangover or booze on my breath. Not only was I clear-headed enough to remember that scripture, I had all the motivation to as well. I was suffering and I needed hope. In the center of the terrible dance of not wanting to drink, not wanting to stop drinking, and fear of the uncertainty either way, was an abyss. It was despair. Fear that struck to the bone. It was the hopeless condition of mind and body, commonly referred to as alcoholism.

This wasn’t meant to be. I had grown up as one would hope. I was well-mannered. Polite and well-behaved. I tested into the gifted classes at school. I had friends and made them easily. I was athletic. So on and so forth. But not only is alcohol indiscriminate, it loves those with ability and confidence – they put up a better fight that alcohol wins every time! Because I cannot defeat the enemy within me, for I am my own enemy. The only way I can heal, recover if you will, is to find a way to let go and trust that a higher power may be able to take my illness on itself. So, needless to say, I was in church and paying attention.

I had begun drinking at 13 years old, becoming consistent around 16 and almost daily by 18. I was known as a man who could handle my liquor. I was a bit crazy. I took things a bit too far. But for a skinny guy, I could handle my liquor. As things grew tough in life, I would use alcohol to cope. When things were going well, I would use alcohol to celebrate. I could always find an excuse to drink, and I did. My family had a pattern with the men all working hard and drinking when they weren’t working. I couldn’t wait to grow up and follow suit, and for the beginning years of my career after school, I did just that. I would pride myself of a hard day’s work and then go to a happy hour and then go home. However, I rarely stopped drinking when I got home. The days at work would get longer as I longed for 5 o’clock to come around. It went from 5 o’clock being its own breath of fresh air, to wanting relief from the angst at 4:30, to wanting a relief from being antsy at 4:00 because I wanted to start drinking. At some point, I lost the power to choose whether I wanted to drink or not. I was developing a mental obsession and a physical dependence to alcohol. I grew a spiritual malady that fueled itself further each day.

Where did this alcoholism come from? What caused it? I had to drink heavily for my alcoholism to take hold, but if drinking heavily made you an alcoholic, all of my friends would have turned out just like me! They haven’t. I suffered tragic family losses. But most people suffer family losses and don’t end up being an alcoholic. I had come to learn that my alcoholism is a disease in the form of an allergy. I have an abnormal reaction to alcohol that does not occur in the normal drinker. I believe that alcoholism is a disease, and the roots of that disease are both in the form nature and behavior.

So there I was in the pew just hurting from life. I was beginning to realize that the problems in my life weren’t from a few bad breaks because of alcohol, but from my decisions regarding alcohol and its impact on my life. I still had a job. A car. A home. Most of my friends but by this point they wouldn’t drink with me. I had gone to rehab after an intervention a few years earlier. Those things tend to ruin happy hours. Why would going to rehab not stop me? Why didn’t the DWIs from a few years before that stop me? Any sane person would have stopped drinking or cut back significantly. I was divorced – that most likely would have happened regardless of drinking but at that time drinking was still a huge factor. I sure wasn’t going to stop to fix the marriage. I had children. Of course a responsible and loving father would stop drinking for their kids. There was my mom and sister who were equally as worried as they were angry. There were the threats at work and my waning energy in the office. A few days before making it to church, I was having to drink in the morning and at lunch to make it through the work day.

I spent the next few years going through cycles of building up a bright outlook for me and my family only to tear it down on its head. The rehabs and psych wards. Hospitals and jails. My life went from having structure to me moving a lot. Changing jobs. Over time things got worse, as alcoholism is a progressive illness. I eventually lost my children. I had actually been a pretty good father through all of this but, being an alcoholic, accusations are easy. I eventually ran out of money. I found out that as a practicing alcoholic I had no rights – society can do as it wishes with me and I can’t lift a finger to stop it.

Jesus told his disciples to get rid of their possessions and go walk with him. I don’t think he meant to do what I did, but nevertheless I had no possessions and had plenty of free time to walk wherever He wanted to take me. My sister came to Houston to take me back to her house in San Antonio. What a blessing to have family to take you in when you do not have a home. Of course I wasn’t going to drink again. God had saved me!

Less than 24 hours later I am walking down the side of I-10 with a carry-on bag dragging behind me. I had been kicked out of my sister’s for drinking. My only option at that point was to check in to a 90-day rehab. It was there that I learned the recovery program well and how to live it. I found God there. It was not that God wasn’t with me the whole time. I had to seek Him. God doesn’t make too difficult a task for those who seek Him. I learned that Faith without works is dead. I read the Book of James and some of the gospel. More of Romans. I immersed myself in the recovery texts and took other patients through the process. I learned humility – I had remembered looking at a toilet a couple years before this and thinking how it had been since college since I had cleaned a toilet. By this point, I was cleaning two toilets that 32 guys shared throughout the day. I learned to see blessings in tragedy. It became apparent to me how heartbreaking the disease of addiction is. Tattered relationships with loved ones. Financial insecurity. Warped lives of blameless children.

I learned to let go. When you have no clue what to do when you get out in the real world because you have no options, it becomes easy to let go. There is nothing to hold on to. I learned that the dark past was the greatest possession I have. With it, I can assist, comfort, and inspire! Inspire!?! What a beautiful God-given gift! Inspiration is the spreading of hope.

With great zeal I went out from that rehab ready to change the world. I was a true crusader of sobriety. I had no option but to move into a sober house. I made it one month before getting kicked out for drinking. There are always hypotheses for why someone started drinking again. I think they are nothing more than speculation. The one truth is that something was missing. The program of recovery works. You see it in others. It is attainable. But I had grown fundamentally miserable there and I drank. 

I somehow landed a job in my career field, which is recruitment, only to get fired soon after. I had just enough gas to get to my sister’s in San Antonio. I knew this time I really could not drink. The next morning, I woke without the shakes. By this point I had always been unable to stop drinking without going into a hospital to detox. God had to have intervened. Nothing had changed about me physically. I was not supposed to wake up “okay”. I believe that for some reason God gave me a footing that morning to turn my life around. Maybe it was because I still had a little bit of fight left in me. After all, suffering produces endurance.

I mowed their lawn to get gas money before I got a job at a coffee shop and a driving range. I also started my staffing practice again. So I was working 3 jobs and staying sober. I made enough money to get back on my feet in Houston! My place nor furniture were nice but they were mine. With my own roof (or at least the roof I was renting from someone). Once early on, I was one deal away from not being able to pay rent and God provided. I was finally getting a life back and it was because I just kept taking one step at a time, learning to trust the Lord more and more along the way. 

I would have liked to say that was the end of my drinking career, but one more, and hopefully last, time I drank. I would sit at the back of the pews in the old sanctuary just praying. Listening and praying. And waking up one morning, it finally happened.

“That’s it. That’s it, I can’t take anymore!” I said. I felt something come over me. I don’t know what the feeling was. I don’t even remember exactly how it felt. I just knew there was some feeling there – physical, spiritual, or both. I rose up and started researching rehabs to go to. I was having to pay out of pocket because I had no insurance. What blessing that God had provided the means to pay for a rehab, and for the ability to talk them down $4,000. 

I checked in at 11:45pm on May 13^th, 2018. I have not had a drink since May 14^th, 2018 and God willing I will never have to endure drinking alcohol again. I could barely walk at the rehab and it would take me forever to get up and downstairs but I kept going, and after a couple weeks I could walk reasonably well. Now, I enjoy playing volleyball.

I could not read when I got there. I could read to myself in my head but I could not audibly read words out loud. Every day I read Jesus Calling in our morning meeting. It took me forever to get through it. I would not let anyone help me and I slowly started getting my ability to read back. In December, I was a narrator for a City of Bethlehem program at my new home church.

I was not able to write because I had lost so much dexterity. But I had to take notes for my sponsor so I kept writing, and my writing improved. The other day my sister complimented my handwriting. That may seem simple but that meant a lot to me.

I found Holy Comforter. This church helped my spiritual journey take root. To be surrounded by wonderful people can give your life purpose. In a story called Freedom From Bondage, there is a quote that says, “The only real freedom a human being can ever know is doing what you ought to do because you want to do it.” I am free today and I thank this church for those opportunities. For this opportunity, in fact.

I now seek God and try my best to be of service to others. I hold on knowing that my two children will be back in my life one day. I now have two children with my wife Genevieve. Yes, I am happily married now to a beautiful woman. I have a lovely home with two cars. I moved to Georgetown, KY simply because I wanted to and I could – now that is freedom! I just found a home church there. I get calls for advice and have repaired relationships with friends and those in the business community. And when I get asked to come speak about recovery I can get on a plane and get to where I need to go. I get to have the opportunity to perhaps get to one person and help them change their lives; and that one person would make everything worth it. That’s just how we, as recovered alcoholics, are.

I have come to know the power and truth of Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior. Healing to the point of redemption. The words to Amazing Grace went from relatable to more of a memoir. I have comfort through my journey knowing He is with me. I have never been angry at God for my hardships. I knew He just needed time, and therefore, so did I. Unfortunately, my trouble has always been my patience more than my Faith. The nights of being blanketed in uncertainty are now some of my fondest memories. You meet Jesus easily when He is the only one left in the room. And He has given me hope that, through it all, He died for the forgiveness of my sin. I know the battle has already been won.

I can relate to many characters in the bible like never before. I feel that I have drawn closer to the Holy Spirit as He has worked in my life and shown me, firsthand, the beauty of His everlasting love. I know what it is like to be protected. I have gone down so many roads, taken so many paths, and crossed through so many gates during my alcoholic journey that there is a good chance I know what it is like to be you… to a degree, of course.

When I first faced sobriety, I thought I may find just enough hope to eek out the meager existence that was to be the rest of my life. But what I found was hope upon hope because of Grace upon Grace. 

And for that I am truly grateful.

Thank you and Amen.

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us”

Hello. My name is Drew and I’m an alcoholic.

That was the first scripture that I ever retained. I was around 30 years old, sitting in a pew at St Martin’s Episcopal Church. I was just now trying again to get sober. What was still left of my personal relationships, career, and health was teetering on further destruction. It was the first time I had been to church in a while, and even longer since I had been in church without a hangover or booze on my breath. Not only was I clear-headed enough to remember that scripture, I had all the motivation to as well. I was suffering and I needed hope. In the center of the terrible dance of not wanting to drink, not wanting to stop drinking, and fear of the uncertainty either way, was an abyss. It was despair. Fear that struck to the bone. It was the hopeless condition of mind and body, commonly referred to as alcoholism.

This wasn’t meant to be. I had grown up as one would hope. I was well-mannered. Polite and well-behaved. I tested into the gifted classes at school. I had friends and made them easily. I was athletic. So on and so forth. But not only is alcohol indiscriminate, it loves those with ability and confidence – they put up a better fight that alcohol wins every time! Because I cannot defeat the enemy within me, for I am my own enemy. The only way I can heal, recover if you will, is to find a way to let go and trust that a higher power may be able to take my illness on itself. So, needless to say, I was in church and paying attention.

I had begun drinking at 13 years old, becoming consistent around 16 and almost daily by 18. I was known as a man who could handle my liquor. I was a bit crazy. I took things a bit too far. But for a skinny guy, I could handle my liquor. As things grew tough in life, I would use alcohol to cope. When things were going well, I would use alcohol to celebrate. I could always find an excuse to drink, and I did. My family had a pattern with the men all working hard and drinking when they weren’t working. I couldn’t wait to grow up and follow suit, and for the beginning years of my career after school, I did just that. I would pride myself of a hard day’s work and then go to a happy hour and then go home. However, I rarely stopped drinking when I got home. The days at work would get longer as I longed for 5 o’clock to come around. It went from 5 o’clock being its own breath of fresh air, to wanting relief from the angst at 4:30, to wanting a relief from being antsy at 4:00 because I wanted to start drinking. At some point, I lost the power to choose whether I wanted to drink or not. I was developing a mental obsession and a physical dependence to alcohol. I grew a spiritual malady that fueled itself further each day.

Where did this alcoholism come from? What caused it? I had to drink heavily for my alcoholism to take hold, but if drinking heavily made you an alcoholic, all of my friends would have turned out just like me! They haven’t. I suffered tragic family losses. But most people suffer family losses and don’t end up being an alcoholic. I had come to learn that my alcoholism is a disease in the form of an allergy. I have an abnormal reaction to alcohol that does not occur in the normal drinker. I believe that alcoholism is a disease, and the roots of that disease are both in the form nature and behavior.

So there I was in the pew just hurting from life. I was beginning to realize that the problems in my life weren’t from a few bad breaks because of alcohol, but from my decisions regarding alcohol and its impact on my life. I still had a job. A car. A home. Most of my friends but by this point they wouldn’t drink with me. I had gone to rehab after an intervention a few years earlier. Those things tend to ruin happy hours. Why would going to rehab not stop me? Why didn’t the DWIs from a few years before that stop me? Any sane person would have stopped drinking or cut back significantly. I was divorced – that most likely would have happened regardless of drinking but at that time drinking was still a huge factor. I sure wasn’t going to stop to fix the marriage. I had children. Of course a responsible and loving father would stop drinking for their kids. There was my mom and sister who were equally as worried as they were angry. There were the threats at work and my waning energy in the office. A few days before making it to church, I was having to drink in the morning and at lunch to make it through the work day.

I spent the next few years going through cycles of building up a bright outlook for me and my family only to tear it down on its head. The rehabs and psych wards. Hospitals and jails. My life went from having structure to me moving a lot. Changing jobs. Over time things got worse, as alcoholism is a progressive illness. I eventually lost my children. I had actually been a pretty good father through all of this but, being an alcoholic, accusations are easy. I eventually ran out of money. I found out that as a practicing alcoholic I had no rights – society can do as it wishes with me and I can’t lift a finger to stop it.

Jesus told his disciples to get rid of their possessions and go walk with him. I don’t think he meant to do what I did, but nevertheless I had no possessions and had plenty of free time to walk wherever He wanted to take me. My sister came to Houston to take me back to her house in San Antonio. What a blessing to have family to take you in when you do not have a home. Of course I wasn’t going to drink again. God had saved me!

Less than 24 hours later I am walking down the side of I-10 with a carry-on bag dragging behind me. I had been kicked out of my sister’s for drinking. My only option at that point was to check in to a 90-day rehab. It was there that I learned the recovery program well and how to live it. I found God there. It was not that God wasn’t with me the whole time. I had to seek Him. God doesn’t make too difficult a task for those who seek Him. I learned that Faith without works is dead. I read the Book of James and some of the gospel. More of Romans. I immersed myself in the recovery texts and took other patients through the process. I learned humility – I had remembered looking at a toilet a couple years before this and thinking how it had been since college since I had cleaned a toilet. By this point, I was cleaning two toilets that 32 guys shared throughout the day. I learned to see blessings in tragedy. It became apparent to me how heartbreaking the disease of addiction is. Tattered relationships with loved ones. Financial insecurity. Warped lives of blameless children.

I learned to let go. When you have no clue what to do when you get out in the real world because you have no options, it becomes easy to let go. There is nothing to hold on to. I learned that the dark past was the greatest possession I have. With it, I can assist, comfort, and inspire! Inspire!?! What a beautiful God-given gift! Inspiration is the spreading of hope.

With great zeal I went out from that rehab ready to change the world. I was a true crusader of sobriety. I had no option but to move into a sober house. I made it one month before getting kicked out for drinking. There are always hypotheses for why someone started drinking again. I think they are nothing more than speculation. The one truth is that something was missing. The program of recovery works. You see it in others. It is attainable. But I had grown fundamentally miserable there and I drank. 

I somehow landed a job in my career field, which is recruitment, only to get fired soon after. I had just enough gas to get to my sister’s in San Antonio. I knew this time I really could not drink. The next morning, I woke without the shakes. By this point I had always been unable to stop drinking without going into a hospital to detox. God had to have intervened. Nothing had changed about me physically. I was not supposed to wake up “okay”. I believe that for some reason God gave me a footing that morning to turn my life around. Maybe it was because I still had a little bit of fight left in me. After all, suffering produces endurance.

I mowed their lawn to get gas money before I got a job at a coffee shop and a driving range. I also started my staffing practice again. So I was working 3 jobs and staying sober. I made enough money to get back on my feet in Houston! My place nor furniture were nice but they were mine. With my own roof (or at least the roof I was renting from someone). Once early on, I was one deal away from not being able to pay rent and God provided. I was finally getting a life back and it was because I just kept taking one step at a time, learning to trust the Lord more and more along the way. 

I would have liked to say that was the end of my drinking career, but one more, and hopefully last, time I drank. I would sit at the back of the pews in the old sanctuary just praying. Listening and praying. And waking up one morning, it finally happened.

“That’s it. That’s it, I can’t take anymore!” I said. I felt something come over me. I don’t know what the feeling was. I don’t even remember exactly how it felt. I just knew there was some feeling there – physical, spiritual, or both. I rose up and started researching rehabs to go to. I was having to pay out of pocket because I had no insurance. What blessing that God had provided the means to pay for a rehab, and for the ability to talk them down $4,000. 

I checked in at 11:45pm on May 13^th, 2018. I have not had a drink since May 14^th, 2018 and God willing I will never have to endure drinking alcohol again. I could barely walk at the rehab and it would take me forever to get up and downstairs but I kept going, and after a couple weeks I could walk reasonably well. Now, I enjoy playing volleyball.

I could not read when I got there. I could read to myself in my head but I could not audibly read words out loud. Every day I read Jesus Calling in our morning meeting. It took me forever to get through it. I would not let anyone help me and I slowly started getting my ability to read back. In December, I was a narrator for a City of Bethlehem program at my new home church.

I was not able to write because I had lost so much dexterity. But I had to take notes for my sponsor so I kept writing, and my writing improved. The other day my sister complimented my handwriting. That may seem simple but that meant a lot to me.

I found Holy Comforter. This church helped my spiritual journey take root. To be surrounded by wonderful people can give your life purpose. In a story called Freedom From Bondage, there is a quote that says, “The only real freedom a human being can ever know is doing what you ought to do because you want to do it.” I am free today and I thank this church for those opportunities. For this opportunity, in fact.

I now seek God and try my best to be of service to others. I hold on knowing that my two children will be back in my life one day. I now have two children with my wife Genevieve. Yes, I am happily married now to a beautiful woman. I have a lovely home with two cars. I moved to Georgetown, KY simply because I wanted to and I could – now that is freedom! I just found a home church there. I get calls for advice and have repaired relationships with friends and those in the business community. And when I get asked to come speak about recovery I can get on a plane and get to where I need to go. I get to have the opportunity to perhaps get to one person and help them change their lives; and that one person would make everything worth it. That’s just how we, as recovered alcoholics, are.

I have come to know the power and truth of Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior. Healing to the point of redemption. The words to Amazing Grace went from relatable to more of a memoir. I have comfort through my journey knowing He is with me. I have never been angry at God for my hardships. I knew He just needed time, and therefore, so did I. Unfortunately, my trouble has always been my patience more than my Faith. The nights of being blanketed in uncertainty are now some of my fondest memories. You meet Jesus easily when He is the only one left in the room. And He has given me hope that, through it all, He died for the forgiveness of my sin. I know the battle has already been won.

I can relate to many characters in the bible like never before. I feel that I have drawn closer to the Holy Spirit as He has worked in my life and shown me, firsthand, the beauty of His everlasting love. I know what it is like to be protected. I have gone down so many roads, taken so many paths, and crossed through so many gates during my alcoholic journey that there is a good chance I know what it is like to be you… to a degree, of course.

When I first faced sobriety, I thought I may find just enough hope to eek out the meager existence that was to be the rest of my life. But what I found was hope upon hope because of Grace upon Grace. 

And for that I am truly grateful.

Thank you and Amen.

Good morning. Welcome to what is officially known as “Low Sunday” in the inner church world. We gathered just a couple of days ago for the celebration of Christmas and it was great. People dressed to the nines, Grandparents and Grandchildren enjoying one another; of course there were hassles too, but most of those were kind of quiet.  And now we gather two days later and probably came expecting to hear more about the cataclysmic event of that first Christmas.  But, as it happens every year for me, I am surprised that not only has the Gospel moved beyond the miraculous event of Angels singing, Shepherds pining, and in the distance Wise Men headed to offer the new born king frankincense, myrrh and a couple pieces of gold.  That’s what we expect but its not what we get.

Suddenly the Gospel seems to have moved on. We’ve gone from mangers and hay and animals in the stall, along with no room in the Inn, to an unusual story of something that took place twelve years later.  That’s right, talking about hurrying the story.  I don’t think I am the only one wanting to hear stories about colic and diapers, first smiles and steps, or at least a couple of first day at school pictures.  If you are wondering what’s going on, you’re not the only one. So what’s going on here? 

Luke is busy here. It is fascinating that we don’t have any stories of Jesus’ childhood except for the one you just heard. But why is it we cut all those years out and get a scene from Jesus childhood when he is 12 years old.

Being 12 was an important age for a Jewish boy in Palestine in the first century. It was at this age that the child would be presented in the Temple.

Jewish law requires that every male child be circumcised on the eighth day after birth, and Jesus’ family complies with that requirement. Then, when the time comes for the child to be presented at the temple, his family once again fulfills the requirements of the Law. In this particular case, the requirement was that every firstborn male child be redeemed—bought back—from God. This was based on the story of the Passover, when the angel of the Lord brought death to all the firstborn among the Egyptians, but “passed over” the houses of the children of Israel, whose doors were sealed with the blood of a lamb. As a result, God claimed possession of every firstborn male in Israel: “for all the first born are mine; when I killed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, I consecrated for my own all the firstborn in Israel … they shall be mine” (Num. 3:13). It is in obedience to this commandment that Jesus’ parents bring him to the temple to be presented, and to offer the prescribed sacrifice for his redemption—for buying him back from God. Curiously, Luke tells us that the Redeemer has to be redeemed, has to be bought back. This is not because he has sinned, but simply because he is a firstborn, and all the firstborn in Israel belong to God. Here, at the presentation in the temple, another Passover theme appears: Jesus the firstborn is to be redeemed by the sacrifice of two turtledoves, and he will then redeem all humankind by his own sacrifice. Gonzalez, Justo L.. Luke: Belief, A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible) . Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition

That’s why we get here so fast. Luke is telling us that Jesus is part of God’s plan of salvation and so he places Jesus smack dab in the middle of the Jewish understanding of how things work with God.

But, if you’re like me, you notice a lot of other things going on in the Gospel this morning.  Yes, he is being presented in the Temple and it’s important to place all of Jesus life, death, resurrection and ascension into the context of the Jewish faith but frankly that’s not that big a deal to us, all of us being Gentiles and not Jews. It makes for a seamless connection but what about all the other things we heard that happened?

How about the fact that Jesus disappeared from his family for three days? I don’t know about you but when I would go to the mall or shopping center or Walmart or wherever with my kids, if I were to lose them for three minutes, I was ready to call in the FBI to help find them. But we’re told Jesus disappeared for three days.  Before you get all numerology on me, this has nothing to do with the time between the crucifixion and resurrection, though they both share the same number of days.  This is just Jesus disappearing but note where he ends up.  He is in the Temple when he’s found, evidently finding a seminar going on and showing that he is and Enneagram 8, he takes it over. Actually, Luke tells us he is in the Temple “listening and asking questions.” Can you imagine? I wonder what he was asking and what they were teaching him? We don’t know but he is clearly precocious and already reflecting that he’s well, just different.  When I was 12 the last place you would have found me would have been in a Temple listening and asking questions. Maybe I would have been throwing a ball or getting into some sort of trouble, but Jesus is already revealing his uniqueness and differences.

Lest you think this was a normal thing that a 12-year-old Jewish boy in Palestine would do on the occasion of his Presentation to the Temple, listen to Mary’s words: “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” Much like our reaction would have been, Mary and Joseph were not happy campers.

But then Jesus response is curious: , “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”

Now Jesus may have actually said those words, but whether or not he did, isn’t important. What we get from Luke’s description is a preview of what is to follow. Jesus entire ministry was to do “his father’s work.” I am not sure that Jesus knew what was to happen in the intervening years, remember his public ministry is still eighteen years away, but the deck is being stacked in our favor even though we’re still in only the second chapter of Luke’s gospel. We’re being told that there is a purpose in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. His purpose is to bring salvation to God’s creation. 

And the biblical scholar Justo Gonzalez reminds us what that means: “Salvation means healing, liberation, freedom from the bondage of sin, promise of eternal life, and several nuances of each of these themes. Thus to say that Jesus is “Savior” means that he frees the people from all evil, including sin, eternal death, disease, oppression, and exploitation. If we do not see all of this as yet, it is because the work of Jesus has not been completed—the reign of God has not yet come to its full fruition.” Gonzalez, Justo L.. Luke: Belief, A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible) . Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition.

And in today’s Gospel, we see none of that. And yet, even though Luke has just begun his story, we are reminded that the purpose of Jesus life is to do his Father’s will; to reveal the Father’s heart, love for all of humanity and God’s desire to free us from sin that binds us to emptiness and despair. And so the beginning takes place in the Temple, the place that those who sought after the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Rachel, Diana and Ruth

“The temple plays an important role in the life of Jesus. It is there that he is first acknowledged publicly as the hope of Israel, in the utterances of Simeon and Anna. The devil takes him to the pinnacle of the temple in order to tempt him (4:9). Jesus also announces the destruction of the temple (21:5–6). Although not so much in Luke as in the rest of the gospel tradition, the temple figures prominently in the week of the passion. Carrying his narrative beyond the other Gospels, Luke ends the Jesus story by telling us that after the ascension the disciples “were continually in the temple blessing God.” Gonzalez, Justo L.. Luke: Belief, A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible) . Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition.

And perhaps the greatest message that at first appears subtly and then in full force when the Temple curtain that separates God’s people from God’s very presence is torn asunder at the crucifixion, no longer do we look for God in a geographical location, like the Temple, but in the very person of Jesus.  And because of his life, death, resurrection and ascension, Jesus, our direct connection to God, remains present among us, in the world, changing and forming us to love like God loves. 

The story still scandalizes since it has so little to do with religion, temples, laws and a set of do’s and don’ts. And it has everything to do with this little infant, so vulnerable and weak, showing us where to find God. Not in the temple but in our world and within us.

In Jesus name.