The Long Day

Well, there was nothing way out of the ordinary today, and, like always, going back to the "normal" routine was great. I've only been at St. Mark for 14 weeks now, but there's definitely a feeling of normality when I'm there. I know what I'm doing, I know how the service works, I know most of the people, and everything just seems comfortable...Just in time for me to take two weeks off for Christmas. The field education is set up so that we don't work over Christmas break, and we don't have to work during our J-term. When you start back up determines when you finish in April/May.

So all of the worship stuff and class was business as usual. The kids in Sunday School were actually pretty excited yesterday about playing their game. We read the stories for the day, and then played "Password" based on those stories. It went well, and it meant they read over the stories a few times, rather than just the one. Hopefully they'll remember them a little bit better. I'm going to be teaching at least once in the spring semester, so I'm trying to pay really close attention to what the students seem to enjoy.

After all the normal stuff, we had the budget meeting. Easily one of the most interesting and most boring parts of the church life all rolled into one. I enjoyed learning about the money flow in and out of the church, the pastor's salary and benefits, the challenges of how to balance the budget, especially when there's a big change, and the general finances of the church. On the other hand, if I never had to talk about/worry about money for the rest of my life, it would be too soon. Not that I feel the need to be a millionaire or anything. I just don't like discussing money. It's just no fun.

Then I went home. On days like yesterday, Linda just hangs out at the church for the next event. She gets some work done and spends some time alone (which I'm sure she enjoys wholeheartedly). I, on the other hand, had work to do at home. Wes' parishoners were coming over for a Christmas cookie party. So Wes, Josiah and I headed to the store to get some things we needed, came home and cleaned up, made peppermint bark, and got everything ready. By the time we got everything together, it was time for me to go back to the church for Confirmation, where I was glad to sit down.

I'm really starting to enjoy my time at Confirmation. I was really worried about working with the youth, because I don't particularly like groups of middle and high school students. But I think the groups are small enough that they don't get hive mind as much. Plus, the girls in the Confirmation class are absolutely hilarious. I love listening to their conversations with one another. I hope that I can continue to develop my relationships with them, and get more comfortable with the youth. Or I can just let Wes teach my Confirmation classes...

On Preaching

I love writing sermons. I'm not going to lie. I'm sort of a geek (haha...that's an understatement). I love reading the texts, talking about them, really internalizing their meaning, reading commentaries, etc. I'm extremely excited about the opportunity to spend so much time in the text each week when I'm a pastor. I really hope that I can also continue to incorporate storytelling in my sermons.

So I spent about two weeks working on my sermon prior to this Sunday--a luxury I hope to have as a pastor with proper planning. The time spent really living in the text is extremely important to me, and I do not want to lose that just because I have to write a sermon every week. At first, I just read the texts once or twice a day, writing some notes on my thoughts, feelings, etc. There was no attempt to find a theme or even pick a text. I just wanted to read the texts and let them speak to me. I loved this. It's amazing where I see these texts play out because I spent so much time reading and thinking on them.

Then I spent some time planning out the focus of my sermon. I chose my main text, thought about the point I wanted to get across, considered possible stories to help connect the biblical passage to the parishoner's lives, and God's grace in the text. I honestly found this to be the hardest part. How do you choose a text? They're all wonderful. They're all important. They're all God's Word! How do I pick just one of four texts? What does that mean for the rest of them? I suppose this will get easier with time, as I can better gauge what my congregation feels and needs, and I have the opportunity to preach most weeks. So I choose the easy route--using the Gospel text and trying to incorporate pieces of the others without being ridiculous.

So when I finally got done with the planning, the sermon literally just flowed out of me in about 30 minutes. Beautiful. This is how I know that the Spirit is flowing. Over the next week, I had Wes and Linda read the sermon, practiced it, tweaked it, and generally listened to the words God was speaking into my life. And on Sunday, I finally got up and delivered it. Wow, that was an interesting experience. I was amazed at the people who were engaged, the people who were not, the people who looked asleep and the ones who were glued to my words. What a terrifying place to be! When Linda asked me how I was feeling about it earlier in the week, I said "Really nervous." My job is to speak God's Words. First I have to listen to God speaking into my life, and then I have to share that. What if God tells me something scary? Controversial? New? Weird?

Yes, I'm nervous, but I'm also so excited. I'm honored that God has placed this call on my life, and I hope I can live up to it. What a powerful position...and what a scary one.

Sermon from Sunday

Here's my sermon from Sunday. I'll do some reflecting on it later today.

Mark 1:1-8

            Preparing for Christmas when I was a child involved a lot of work. There was the tree to put up, the cookies to make, the house to decorate, and, of course, the presents to buy. And since Grandma came to visit every year at Christmastime, we had to wait to start most of these preparations until she came to our house. Sometimes, this was early in the month of December, but sometimes it seemed we had to wait until Christmas was almost past to get ready. Then came all the work, and with it, all the arguments. “Don’t put the same kind of ornament so close together!” “Mom, Jessica got to decorate more cookies than me!” “Mom, Josiah is trying to hang up my ornaments!” Without fail, something would go wrong: the string of lights would be a ball of knots, the cookies would burn or not cook all the way, or we would be missing a whole box of decorations. But somehow, it always got done, and Christmas visited the Matlack house for another year.

            In the Gospel lesson today, we hear about a very different way to prepare for Christ’s coming. John the Baptist was a weird guy. In a time when poverty was rampant, he chose to live outside of society, where at least the poor could beg for alms. He went out to the wilderness, to sleep on the ground, eat bugs and honey when he could find them, and wear strange clothes.

            The Christian band, DC Talk, has a song called “Jesus Freak,” that talks about John:

There was a man from the desert with naps in his head

The sand that he walked was also his bed.

The words that he spoke made the people assume

There wasn’t too much left in the upper room.

With skins on his back and hair on his face,

They thought he was strange by the locusts he ate.

This song talks about the original “Jesus freak,” a man who went out and did some very strange things just to prepare the way of the Lord. He didn’t care what people thought of him, and he didn’t give up his faith even in the face of death. Supposedly, John was following the command from Isaiah as a messenger of God: he was living out in the wilderness, preparing the way of the Lord. But what good did this do? Who knew that Jesus was the one John talked about? Who helped John to “make his paths straight?” Was anyone truly prepared for the coming of the Lord?           

            Did John’s disciples go home and put up a tree, nativity scenes, and tinsel? Did they cook a huge meal and give each other presents? How could they possibly prepare for the Lord’s coming?

            The Messiah was supposed to be a king, someone who would save the people of Israel, the Jews. They expected him to come riding in on a warhorse, ready to rescue them from their oppressors, the Romans. A king would have been preceded by a royal messenger, someone wearing nice robes, eating rich foods, and making room for the king. They expected a celebration, a clear indication that the Messiah had come and was going to rescue them. The only preparations necessary would have been done with excitement, and the anticipation of a new way of life.

            Yet this isn’t what the Israelites get. Starting with John’s pronouncement, something seems to be off. John is in the wilderness, not running or riding through the streets, proclaiming the coming of the Messiah. John is baptizing people as they repent of their sins, not helping them get ready for the inevitable victory over the Romans. John is wearing camel’s hair and a leather belt, not majestic clothing. And he eats locusts and wild honey, not the rich food of kings.

            Good, studious Jews should have known that this was what they were to expect. God announced in Isaiah that this is exactly what God’s messenger would be like. But we very rarely want to recognize that what we’ve been told is how it will be. We like to think about the perfect, clean, holy nativity scene. We like to prepare for that Jesus—the one that makes sense to us, the one that’s easy to take. Preparing for the perfect nativity, complete with the silent, beautiful baby Jesus means putting up our Christmas trees, decorating the house inside and out, buying presents for our friends and family, cooking a big meal and spending Christmas Day hanging out watching football.

            But is this really how we prepare for Jesus’ coming? Because Christmas isn’t just about some distant time when Jesus was born as a baby. Christmas is also the time for us to anticipate Jesus’ return. Jesus has promised that he will return again, and that his coming will be, well…interesting. Peter says, “[T]he day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed.” I’m not sure my Christmas tree is going to survive that!

            So if all of our preparations for Jesus coming revolve around the one day—and maybe a few after—when we celebrate his birth, how will we possibly be ready for the day of the Lord? Jesus doesn’t want our presents, and I really doubt he cares if the lights on our house are symmetrical, burnt out, or timed to music. Jesus cares about what we are doing now to bring the Kingdom of God ever closer. Peter tells us that we should “strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish; and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.” I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen a lot of peace or contentment with God in this Christmas season.

            Yet God constantly and consistently empowers us to prepare the way for Christ’s coming, not just during the Christmas season but all year, every year. We can see this in the power of John the Baptist’s message to his people. Even though he was different, even though he lived in the wilderness and acted in strange ways, God gave him the authority to prepare the way for Christ’s coming. And people did know when Jesus came that he was the one about whom John had spoken. They were prepared in a different way than we might expect: they had repented of their sins and were baptized by John in the Jordan River. There was no great ceremony about it, and John constantly reminded them that he was not the one for whom they were waiting. He was just the path-maker. Through John’s faith, God was able to create a way for Jesus to break into the world. And people knew when it happened.

            Just like God sent John to prepare his community for Christ’s coming, God sends us and gives us Scripture to prepare for Christ as well. In the Psalm today, we see a beautiful description of what will happen on the day of the Lord:

Surely his salvation is at hand for those who fear him,

            that his glory may dwell in our land.

Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;

            righteousness and peace will kiss each other.

Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,

            and righteousness will look down from the sky.

Christ’s return will be wonderful. Everything will be restored to the way it should be, the way God intended. War and famine, pain and grief, racism and sexism, abuse and neglect, all of this will be wiped away. What a wonderful future we have with Christ.

            Yet preparing the way means more than waiting around expectantly for Christ to come and fix everything. We learn from Jesus’ life that simply talking about how things will be one day is not the solution. Jesus actively sought out the poor, lonely, hurt, and sick to help them. Every step of his journey meant changing someone’s life for the better. No, he didn’t single handedly fly in like some superhero and defeat the Romans. That was not the point of Jesus coming into the world like us. We can’t change everything by snapping our fingers. But we can help our neighbor who doesn’t have enough money to eat three meals a day. We can sit down and listen to our coworker whose life isn’t going the way she planned. We can love our families, forgive those who trespass against us, and do our best to spread Christ’s love throughout the world.

            Perhaps this is what Isaiah is saying when he talks about leveling mountains, bringing up valleys, and straightening crooked paths. It’s not about changing the natural landscape around us. It’s about bringing justice to the world, bringing up those who are low, sharing ourselves so that we are not “better” than someone else, and making the path a little bit easier for our neighbor. God empowers us to do this through the many gifts with which God blesses each of us. We are called to prepare the way of the Lord in this messy, restless, and sometimes scary world. If this means being weird, so be it. If this means acting against the status quo, that’s just where we need to be. The good news is that, even in these frightening situations, God will walk alongside us and give us the strength to make his paths straight.

            In just a few minutes, we’re going to say the Lord’s Prayer as we prepare for Communion. In the prayer, we say, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” This is what it means to prepare the way of the Lord. When we pray this, we are saying that we will abandon our own wills, our own desires, and give them over to God’s purposes. God’s will is already done in heaven. It is up to us to start doing God’s will on earth; we are asking God to continue to empower us to do this work. That’s part of the preparation we do for Christ’s coming—changing the world for the better.

            Preparing for Jesus isn’t a one-time thing. We can’t just set up the tree, hang the decorations, and wait. Jesus didn’t come into the world as a helpless tiny baby in order to stay that way forever. He came to grow, to teach, and to lead. He didn’t die so that we could be content in our own salvation and supposedly ready for his return. He came so that all might know the amazing love of God through Jesus Christ. He didn’t come so we could sit back complacently, but to empower us to share the Gospel news with all people: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. Amen.