Following God's Lead

Epiphany 1/11/15
Farewell Sermon
Matthew 2:1-12; Isaiah 60:1-6

Holy God, arise upon us and shine your glory among us. Help us to see you in our midst, so that our hearts might thrill and rejoice in your presence. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Have you ever felt like you’ve been in exactly the right place at the right time?

A friend of mine has an amazing story about being the first person on the scene of a car accident. My friend had some significant first aid and emergency management training, so he was able to help the driver, who was injured, until the paramedics showed up.

He was in the right place at the right time.

Sometimes there’s an experience we need to have, or a person we need to meet.

I would never have been born if my parents didn’t each happen to be at the same pizza joint at the same time, each with their own friends. One group of friends was on the way in to the restaurant and the other on the way out – but it turns out that the friends knew each other, so the group who was leaving decided to stay, my parents got to meet, and the rest is history.

They needed to be there that day. They were in the right place at the right time.

God regularly leads us to places we need to be.

Sometimes these are profound, life-changing moments, like the ones I already mentioned.

And sometimes, God leads us to simple experiences – waking up before dawn to watch a beautiful sunrise, or finding a great sale at the grocery store in a week when money is particularly tight.

Whether simple or profound, God guides us in life – and when we follow that guidance, we just might have a chance to meet God face to face.

That’s what happened with the wise men from the east.

They followed God’s guidance, and they got to see God in person, once they finally followed the star all the way to Jesus.

The wise men, or magi, took a risk by going to seek out Jesus. These people were not Jewish; the promise of a Messiah didn’t mean anything to them personally.

They were scholars, and they probably had some standing in their own society. What do you think their neighbors and families thought when they went on a mission to find this mysterious new king?

Also, the gifts they brought to Jesus were pricey, but it sounds like the wise men paid for them out of their own pockets. Economically speaking, this was an expensive trip for them.

And yet, despite the potential personal cost, these magi still followed the leading of God’s star.

And that star led them to an Epiphany.

According to the dictionary, an epiphany is “a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.”
(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/epiphany?s=t)

Epiphany is the Christian festival on which we remember the visit of the wise men to the Christ child.

In the church, we have a day set aside to remember these mysterious foreigners who followed God’s guidance to meet the baby Jesus – the day of Epiphany is a time to celebrate meeting God in our midst, and following divine signs to the places where God is leading us.

Epiphany is the day when the wise men paid attention to the essential meaning of that special star – when a commonplace thing like a star led them to meet God in a simple child.

Epiphany is a fitting celebration for us today.

Epiphany is about beginnings and endings, about taking steps into the unknown and about trusting in God’s guidance.

Epiphany is about leaving the familiar behind, building relationships with new people, and growing in our life of faith.

Epiphany is about recognizing God among us.

Just like God led the magi, God leads us through life.

We rarely get astronomical phenomena to show us the way… but we do get signs from God.

God leads us using conversations with our family and friends, for example. I’m guessing that most of us have been at a crossroads in our life at some point in time, and it took the wisdom and guidance of a loved one for us to figure out which path to take next.

God leads us in one direction by closing all the doors to other paths. Maybe you’ve had that happen to you. It’s like Maria says in The Sound of Music – when God closes a door, somewhere he opens a window! We may think we know which direction we’re heading in life, but sometimes God nudges, or even shoves, us onto a different road.

God leads us through prayer and Scripture and our own intuition… through coincidences and news stories and unexpected phone calls.

I recently learned that a group of Christian teachers in the Middle Ages, the mystics, said to pay attention to the same message, received unbidden, from three different sources.

That message just might be from God.

Allow me to share one example of how God has guided me.

It will be easy for you to draw parallels from this example to your own life, and to where you and I are today in our relationships with one another.

Three years ago I was finishing up my first call, as an associate pastor at a larger congregation. I had been there just over a year, but there was an interim senior pastor in place when I started. When a new senior pastor was called to the church, he wanted to build his own staff, so it was time for me to move on.

It was a sign – I was being led away from that church and on to new adventures.

That doesn’t mean I was happy about it at the time – I was enjoying that congregation, and was going to miss the people there. I could see God at work in the ministry we were doing together.

But God was with me as I left that congregation – and God has continued to be with those people as they carry on in ministry without me.

As it turned out, I ended up between calls for 6 months. I had the opportunity to preach in about a dozen different churches, and I learned a lot through that experience. Those six months were also my last as a single woman – so I was able to take some extra time to manage the details of our wedding planning.

God had led me to the church where I served my first call. And then God led me away. God led those people to call me, and then God led them to move on without me.

This is the way God works.

God guides our steps, but once we reach a destination, we can’t stop listening, because God is still guiding us.

Consider the magi. They followed the star until they found Jesus. But they didn’t stay with Jesus forever. They stopped to meet this miraculous child, and then they moved on with their lives.

And they still listed to God’s guidance when they took that next step. God came to them in a dream and warned them not to go back to Herod, because Herod was going to kill the baby they had just seen and worshipped.

Can you imagine how different the story might be if the magi hadn’t listened to God in that dream?

         God led the wise men to Jesus for a while, and then God led them away.

After my first call, I was able to articulate more clearly what I was looking for in a church. I wanted to be on my own for a while – I wanted to try preaching every week, and I wanted to learn how to manage church budgets and buildings and whatnot.

You know, often pastors who work on a staff with other pastors become specialists – like some doctors become gerontologists or podiatrists or anesthesiologists. I didn’t want to be a specialist, I wanted to be a generalist. I wanted to try my hand as a family practitioner.

I felt that God was leading me to something different for the next step in my life.

         And God led me to this congregation.

And you have given me the chance to learn about how to run a small congregation with minimal staff. You have helped me become a generalist.  

And God is still guiding us.

God is leading this congregation to try a different model of pastoral ministry for the next chapter in your life together.

God is leading me to partner with a new congregation and new colleagues.

God continues to lead all of us.

For a time, our paths converged.

But just like the magi had to keep on traveling, we can’t stay here forever. We need to keep listening for the guidance of God, and right now God is leading us down separate paths.

Today, on Epiphany, we celebrate that God is among us, and that we can meet God in common, everyday places. We remember that it’s important to follow where God leads us.

And we also remember that God’s guidance doesn’t stop once we reach our destination. God won’t stop guiding us until we enter life eternal – then, after we die, finally the star will stop moving and the dreams will stop coming and we’ll be able to settle where we have been led.

Until that time, everything is just a stop along the way.

Several years ago, I was working as the chaplain in a nursing home.

When I ended a visit with one of the residents, I would use the same words I did in everyday conversation. “See you later!”

Inevitably, it happened one day that I didn’t see the resident later. She died before we had a chance to visit again. I remembered what I had said at our last visit and realized some reevaluation was in order.

         After a lot of reflection, though, I decided to keep using that phrase.

         See you later.

It’s always true. We may see each other in church or at the grocery store. We may see each other at a special event, or we may get together for coffee sometime.

         Or we may not see each other again in this life.

But we will see each other again someday, when we are united with Christ and all the faithful people who have ever lived.

We have spent some time together here.

We managed to listen to God’s guidance, and we found ourselves in the right place at the right time.

But the time has changed. God is guiding us down new paths, and we can’t continue the journey together any more.

God will continue to guide us, though, so that we can keep being in the right place at the right time even if we are not there together.

And eventually, when our journeys in this life have ended, we know that we all will see God face to face.

Until then… see you later.

In the beginning

Christmas 2B, 1/4/15
John 1:1-18

Save your people, O Lord. Gather us from scattered places, turn our mourning into joy and give us gladness for sorrow. Satisfy us with your bounty. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

In the beginning…

This is where the story starts, the whole Christian journey.

It doesn’t begin with a conversion experience or with our baptism, or even with the resurrection of Christ.

According to the Gospel of John, the Christian journey goes all the way back to the beginning. 

Put yourself in the shoes of the earliest Christians.

You’ve just experienced a life-changing event – this teacher, Jesus, turned your world upside down in a good way.

And then he was executed by the occupying government.

And then he was raised from the dead.

He changed everything that you thought you knew about God, and people, and the rules of nature. He taught you incredibly profound things about the way the world works – or at least, the way it ought to work.

So you want to tell people about this man, God, Jesus.

How do you begin?

You might start by saying, He is risen!

This is a good start, because Christ rising from the dead really was the definitive changing event that kick-started Christianity.

He is risen, the traditional Easter greeting, is a great summary of the Gospel.

But someone who isn’t familiar with the story of Jesus wouldn’t have any idea what you were talking about.

         Who is risen?

We must go back.

There was this man, Jesus.

What was he like? Why does he matter?

Most biblical scholars believe that there was a very early document that contained a collection of the sayings of Jesus. They call it the Q source, because this theory came from a German scholar, and the word for “source” in German starts with a Q.

No one has ever actually discovered a copy of the Q source, but its existence makes a lot of sense. There are parts of some of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, that are word-for-word identical with each other. If three different scribes recorded the same sermon of Jesus right after he preached it, they’d use different vocabulary to do it – dinner or the meal, the house or the home, the disciples or the followers.

But these passages are identical. The logical conclusion is that there was one written source that all the Gospel writers copied.

And so, it seems that the first record Jesus’ followers made of his ministry was collection of sayings.

This was their first attempt at answering the questions, who was Jesus? Why did he matter? Jesus was the guy who taught us these things.

But this didn’t answer all the questions. We must go further back.

People needed to know more about the man behind these sayings. They wanted a description of his character.

Enter Mark, the writer of the first Gospel, chronologically speaking.

Mark wrote the earliest existing account of Jesus’ ministry sometime in the late 60s or early 70s AD – about 30 or 40 years after Jesus’ resurrection.

As the first witnesses to Jesus’ ministry were dying off, Mark started the trend of recording the event for posterity.

If you look to the opening chapter of the Gospel of Mark, you’ll see that he begins with a comparison.

Most of you have heard of this other guy, John. Remember John? Oddball preacher who baptized people in the wilderness? The one we all thought was a messenger foretold by the prophet Isaiah?

Jesus was kinda like John, only better.

Take John, the best preacher most of us have ever heard, the one who led so many people into a new relationship with God, who was so controversial that he was arrested and executed – take that guy, and then multiply his message by a thousand. That’s what Jesus was like.

Who was Jesus? Why did he matter?

Mark’s answer is a comparison.

But, as the Christian message spread, and more people heard about Jesus – how he conquered death, how he spoke with wisdom, how he was better than any other teacher – more questions arose about who this guy really was.

He is risen! This is what he taught. This is who he was like.

These simple explanations couldn’t work for a broader audience.

There needed to be more of a story.

Matthew and Luke took a shot at describing Jesus for the world. These Gospels were written about 10 years later than Mark. Matthew was written primarily for a Jewish audience, and Luke was written primarily for Gentiles – for people who may have been unfamiliar with Judaism and Hebrew culture.

Matthew started his Gospel with a genealogy going all the way back to Abraham, the patriarch around whom the Jews had built their identity. Starting with Abraham, Matthew names an all-star list of Jewish ancestors, and this lineage culminates with the birth of Jesus.

Who is Jesus? He’s the one we’ve been waiting for since the time of Abraham. Jesus is the promised Messiah, the person who will redeem the Hebrew people.

That tactic wouldn’t have worked with Luke’s audience.

Writing for Gentiles, Luke needed something more globally relevant. So he sat down to write an “orderly account” as he called it, and filled the beginning of his Gospel with stories about Zechariah and Elizabeth, and Mary. Luke makes the characters relatable and believable for his readers, so that they can relate to Jesus and understand his message, once he finally enters the scene in chapter two.

Who is Jesus? He’s a real person, someone like you, a holy man sent by God for the sake of all people on the earth – not just the Jews.

Jesus is risen, he teaches, he’s like John, he comes from Abraham, he came for the sake of the world.

But questions remain.

And so we come to the Gospel of John, written another 20 years or so later than Matthew and Luke, about 70 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus.

In the beginning.

Does that sound familiar yet?

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. And God spoke.

In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, and the Word was God.

John takes us all the way back to the beginning – not the beginning of the ministry of Jesus, or even the beginning of the Jewish people, but to the very beginning of the world.

In the beginning was the Word. [hands wide]

And the Word became flesh and lived among us. [hands close]

In the course of a few verses, John takes us from the big picture – as big as it gets, the overarching story of the creation of the universe – to our own time and place, to God actually choosing to dwell in our midst.

Here, in the first eighteen verses of the Gospel of John, we have the summary of the Christian message – Jesus came, a guy similar to John the Baptist and yet totally out of his league. Jesus, the divine Word, timeless, present at creation, was also flesh and blood just like us.

Jesus is everything that Christians have been saying for years, and more.

John’s Gospel starts off with a confession of faith.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life.

         I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.

The Word became flesh.

I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only son, our Lord. He was born – he became incarnate – he was given a human body along with all its frailties.

This confession of faith, as it turns out, is also a Christmas story.

Jesus is God in human form, the eternal creator of the universe born as a member of God’s chosen people.

That’s why we’re hearing this passage today, on the second Sunday of Christmas. It’s not as popular as the birth narrative from Luke, but the opening verses of John still tell the story of God miraculously coming to earth as a human.

This passage invites us to look at the story of Jesus through a wide-angle lens.

Sometimes it’s worth picking a Bible passage apart, and unearthing the meaning of each particular word, and researching the original historical context, and analyzing the verses as if they were an equation that needed to be solved.

Sometimes that’s the right way to interpret the Bible.

But not this passage from John.

John 1 is like an impressionist painting – you have to look at the whole thing, and let an understanding of the picture come over you as you absorb it.

If you try to break it into too many pieces, you’ll just end up with meaningless splotches of color that don’t mean much on their own.

John is trying to paint a picture with his words.

For me, I imagine something like the stained glass window that is right through that door, where a star comes down and touches the earth with its light, and transforms the world so that it finally makes sense for the first time ever.

For you, the picture may look a little different.

So I’d invite you to close your eyes and hear some of these words again, and let your imagination loose.

In the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God.

He was in the beginning with God.

All things came into being through him,

and without him not one thing came into being.

What has come into being in him was life,

and the life was the light of all people.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.

But to all who received him,

who believed in his name,

he gave power to become children of God,

who were born,

not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man,

but of God.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us,

and we have seen his glory,

the glory as of a father’s only son,

full of grace and truth. (1:1-5, 11-14)

Amen.