November 30 A-Advent is
a time of preparing for the new age, the “Second Coming”
of the Cosmic Christ, and moving into waiting for the Christmas
birthday of Jesus. This year, we’ll have a little Advent
Alphabet. I encourage you to replace each word with another word that
fits the sense of the season.

Monday-B-Bells are part
of the soundscape of Christmas. It’s not just that we associate
the peals with church, but with the Salvation Army kettle bell, or
the bells on Santa’s sleigh. Something about the almost
heavenly sound sinks into the soul.. Jocelyn is part of the bell
choir at John Knox in Indianapolis. We had a woman from Nashville do
a concert for us at Kingston where she played a whole range as a
one-woman bell choir. We play her Christmas CD to help get in the
holiday spirit. What songs move you into a holiday mode?

Tuesday-C-Comfort and
Joy the song says from the angelic announcement to the shepherds.
With all of the Christmas parties, comfort and joy seem to come in a
bottle or a punch bowl. We seek it in pleasant numbness because we
are poor at offering it. Come to think of it adults are often poor at
receiving comfort. Where do you feel most comfortable? What person
gives you comfort?

Wednesday-D -Deliver.
Mary delivered Jesus; she gave birth. We do well to imagine it as a
birth with all of the pain and anxiety of any birth. We don’t
even know if she had a midwife. After delivery, her child Jesus would
live to deliver all of us. It’s one of those words with a great
range of meanings, but its Latin root deals with freedom, liberation,
release. Freed of the burden of her pregnancy, Mary gave birth to one
who would give us new life, new birth, freedom from the ravages of
sin and death.

Thursday-E-Elizabeth
knew bitter disappointment of wanting a child and the whispers among
the people of why she and her husband could not conceive. As her body
changed, she had long given up that hope. Then, when all reason to
hope was gone, she was going to have a boy. Just as the nation’s
hope was in the doldrums, her son John would be a precursor of new
hope beyond any reason to hold on to that elusive virtue.

Friday-F- Focus is
difficult when so many things clamor for our attention. During this
busy season it seems a good idea to focus on the faith for at least a
little while. Pick a word that is sacred, powerful, meaningful to
you. If you prefer, pick a phrase, a hymn fragment and let it repeat
in your mind, in time with your breath. Maybe write a Christmas card
to God. What kind of card would you pick?

Saturday-G-Gloria is
obviously Latin for glory. Lf the angels sang in Hebrew I assume it
would be kabod. It’s one of the few Latin words Protestant
churches have kept. I usually think of glory as a synonym for being
in the presence of God. The presence evokes the desire to glorify: to
honor, praise and thank God. We call some experiences, glorious at
rare times. The glory of God was hidden in a manger at Bethlehem
years ago. Divine Glory doesn’t require pomp. Its splendor
shines from within.

Isaiah 64:1-9 Sermon

We pray and pray and see little change. Are we talking to ourselves? Is the promised return of Jesus Christ an illusion? Some see the world in such sorry shape that only dramatic divine intervention can shake it into a new form, like a potter balling up the wet clay and starting over again. More often, we walk in disappointment, as when Thanksgiving gatherings did not meet up with our fondest hopes.

Frustration is evident here in our readings this morning. It is possible that the people are reacting to prophecies of perfection, but find real life hard and unrewarding. Despair is not the only enemy of hope. Frustrations corrode hope over the years. They wonder why God’s power seemed present only in the old stories, not in their lives now. God seemed hidden, a God who did not hear. So, this is a prayer complaining to a God who they wonder is even there for them any more. Boldly, they go so far as to say that if God were more apparent to us, then we would not fall into sin so easily.

After they complain, they use a rare prayer phrase, our father. They are able to say our father after they get their complaints our of their system, and then they start to set them aside. I knew a very religious teacher who had an epiphany when he realized that it was not my father, but our father. God does not work with individuals alone, but God works with entire social systems. God works in the interaction and intersection of groups of people. God takes into account the good of the whole as well as the good of the one. When God hears a prayer that prayer must be taken in light of the whole community, not just our small part in it. Even small events can have ripples that can touch the heart of the existing order.

Communion is presence of the living Jesus Christ in our lives this new church year. In our tradition the Spirit lifts us into a heavenly table of Christ. Here God accepts our need to have a tangible reminder of the presence of god. So, as the hymn says, we touch and handle things unseen. We actually ingest into our life’s blood the spirit of Jesus Christ this morning. After we eat our fill and beyond on Thanksgiving tables, here we get a spiritual feast where just a little is more than enough. Communion continues the potter and clay image in a new key. In Communion we receive the presence of Jesus Christ. That means that the spirit of Christ works within us every day. It is a personal force that shapes us, molds us, coaxes us. The elements are from nature, but they have been changed by human ingenuity and work from wheat and grape to bread and juice. Most of us said a special grace around Thanksgiving tables, or will soon, and Communion is an act of grace for each one us to live ladled with grace until we meet again in Lent.

We get a jump-start on 2009 by having the church year start a month before calendar New Year’s. We enter a new year with hopes for better times. God is always at work making a new world out of what we have crafted together. Just as the roots of perennials are at work beneath the surface, as their roots gain energy, so Communion works at the root level of our lives to nourish us and prepare us for the shock of the new that comes every year. God is setting the stage for a new age for better times. We are charged with doing our part to help make our corner of the world a fit place for human beings to live, especially for the children growing into it. We don’t do it alone. God is at work shaping us even as we help shape God’s world.

Many consider this the
start of a major new section in this long book, even as it reworks
themes from the first section at points

After words of warning,
we hear a decidedly different voice: one of comfort. Instead of
shouts of warning, we hear of tenderness.

There may be a tacit
admission that Israel’s affliction was not condign with her
wrongs. Notice, she has paid double, not merely paid, for sins.

v. 3 may be some sort
of choral response, or it may be a voice from the heavenly council
(see Ps. 89). Notice that the Greek version punctuates differently,
and that is what is reflected in Mark on John the Baptist.

Some detect a note of a
second exodus here. This reflects back to an earlier passage
(35:5-10) and is echoed in a number of later passages (esp. 41, 42)
If that is true, instead of wilderness wandering, the people will be
treated to a divine super-highway, with the obstacles flattened.

v.6 moves to a
dialogue with heaven. The prophet’s words are utterly
depressed. After all, the prophet has seen destruction. Why bother,
life is so fragile, so transient, so ephemeral. God’s
breath/spirit does cause flourishing but withering.

v.8 I can’t tell
if this is a response from heaven, or the result of the prophet’s
cathartic words of depression and seeing a note of hope. Do you think
the word fo the Lord is this passage, the entire gospel as in I Peter
1:23-5, or the entire Bible?

What does it mean to
you to have stability/confidence in the security fo the word of God?

Does the transitory
nature of life bother you, or do you accept it as part of the antural
order?

v.9I can’t tell
if the prophet is to speak or is Zion itself to speak the good news.
Herald is not a word we use now Broadcast would be better.

vv.10-11 have 2 images
of God of might and compassion. The emphasis seems to me to be on the
gentleness after the terrifying destruction of Jerusalem and the pain
of exile.

Some hold that we are in a new section of Isaiah from chapter 56. With a book that mixes so many periods and images, it is hard to tell. if they are correct, we are dealing with the disappointment of the returned exiles that everything is not perfect.

1) The writer yearns for the active presence of God, as we all do, at least at times. We do not enter into the presence of God as much as God moves toward us.

2) If I understand v. 5 (NRSV) correctly, they see God hiding and this pushed them into a complacency that allowed sin.  While ch. 40 has voices of heaven, no one calls here in the awful silence. Seitz (NIB:529) sees this as the cry of the servants who suffer.

3) It seems to me that yet means that in spite of God's hidden quality, God is still a father. We have a good example of father language here at v. , as our, not my, a sense of God the creator of all. All Israel begs for help. Here is an interesting way to take the chosen and still make a universal claim.

4) Do I detect, in v. 7, at least a hint that people do not call on God becuase not only is God not seen, but God doesn't listen anyway?

 

5) As we know from Jeremiah, the potter clay image is a powerful one. Here it has a sense of God molding us through adversity as well as success. It has a sense that our spiritual life is molded even when we may be unaware of the preocesses shaping us. I would hasten to add that the metaphor breaks down a bit when we consider that we, the clay, ahve some hand in shaping ourselves as well.

 

6) This silent God, this invisible, this hiiden God is a deep weel. It is a healthy reminder that spiritual life is not dealing with an easy God. One could go in a mystical direction in pursuit of the silence.

 

Our parable today talks about a distribution of money. A Talent= a year’s wages, or even 15 years’ wages at minimum wage, so around 15,000 to 225,000. Here, we do not see equality, either in what they offer or what they receive. Please note that everyone starts with a good bit. We tend to feel so sorry for the person who got but one talent, but it sounds different when it is a decent sum of money. Most people would be very happy walking out of the casino on Fairland road with that much money.

They are judged by how they use what we have. The first two double their money. It’s easy to blow right past the second person in the story, but he does just as well as the much more talented person who has been given much more. What allows him to exceed expectations? I would suggest that the second servant has learned from previous successes, and maybe learned from mistakes as well. My guess is that he hadn’t taken down times to heart, so as to define him. He reflected on his attributes and appreciated them: his ability, interest, and willingness to take a risk.

What prevents the third servant from employing the gifts at all and induces him to bury his talent? Maybe it is fear of losing what we have-fear, or the risk/fear of getting hurt/ or thinking we are not worth the trouble. The people with more to lose were willing to take a risk. The last person hunkered down. Better to stick with what you have rather than risk it. The third servant has a hard time grasping generosity.

Similar attitudes hit us when we regard our spiritual lives. We act as if we have to put it away until it’s needed, like canned goods for the rainy day. I get a sense that god looks at how we fail to deploy our spiritual gifts in a way similar to seeing someone fail to use their abundant talents in other areas of life,

Join in your master’s happiness. Paul says to encourage and build one another up We all need to encourage seeing what we have and how to employ those gifts. Paul audience, earlier than Matthew’s, is also quite concerned about what to do in the interim period for the church. We all have spiritual talents. Spiritual gifts, but we let them lie fallow much of the time

I’m not going to emphasize the use of our talents, but limit it to the use of spiritual gifts. All of us receive a fair share of spiritual talent. We all receive the measure of grace we could use. For all of us, it is more than we could use in a few days. The master days: come share in my happiness, in my joy. I sense the feeling si like the vicarious pleasure we get out of a family member doing well. When Jesus talks about the kingdom of heaven it seems to have a quality of a present gift and future drive. Just as the servants have a fairly large amount of money, they are still going to work with it for the future. This is not the advice to wait for a supposed gathering in the heaven during the dark times. Paul insists that we are not created for dark times. After all, we are children of the light, so we don’t have to hide away our spiritual gifts. It does us no good to tuck away our spiritual gifts until we think we need them. That does not give them time to breathe and flourish in the light, so that they are stronger when they are felt to be needed. It does others no good for us to hide away our spiritual gifts like misers, as if they are in a vault like Jack Benny’s. Spiritual gifts are made to grow; we won’t lose them.

Ezekiel 34:11-16,20-4
For Christ the King, the lectionary selects these sections.

After God indicts poor leaders/shepherds. God decides to take center stage for the exiles in the promise of better leadership. this image is in Ps. 23, of course, and Ps. 80. Jeremiah is on the same page at 23:1-6. Micah' famously uses the image in 4:6 and again in 7:14. Of ocurse, John 10 employs the image toward christ and Rev. has the lamb replace the lion.

All of the leadership failures of v. 4 will be addressed by God's care for a restored people. If this is the Day of the Lord, it is one of restoration, but perhaps of deep darkness for others. Some manuscripts have God on the warpath (asmid, but others have a more benevolent view, asmir)Perhaps it is a new exodus.

 

This is a good place to take stock of our conceptions of leadership. Note that the word king is not employed but aservant, and an older word for leadership, prince. It is a good place to consider control v. empowerment.

It leads us to consider Social Darwinism and the survival of the fittest. God is furious tha tthe strong are expoiting the weak. It is in stark contrast to god being a republican. (Note that theological conservatives, sojourners and the ESA realize this in their postings)

God will rule through a messianic Davidic figure who will be a good shepherd.

for those of an ecological mindset, the fouling of the water is a good biblical stand against pollution.

In our first reading
the Promised Land is no longer a promise, but a reality. Israel is in
possession of it. Now Joshua gathers the people together to make a
sacred bond, a covenant. They make a memorial as well, just as they
had a memorial to the crossing of the Jordan from the wilderness into
this new life of promise fulfilled. Joshua knows that they will need
aids for memory, maybe not for this generation, but for generations
to come. Over one hundred years ago, people raised this church up.
The care they took with it makes it a fitting memorial for the depth
of their commitment, one that rippled out to a future that they would
scarcely even imagine.

In this ceremony, Here
Joshua does a remarkable thing for them and us. Choose this day whom
you will serve he says. We are taken into his situation, but his
situation becomes ours as well. Every day of our lives we choose whom
we will serve. Joshua knows that in victory, in the good times, we
are most likely to let our relationship with god wither. It is a fact
that trouble is what drives us toward God.

Most people assume our
story in Matthew is an allegory where different elements stand for
something else. Most people agree it is about the long delay in the
return of Jesus. So many folks like to play at predicting the end of
the age, but here is a story that doesn’t predict for us.
Instead it tells us to be ready when Jesus would return. Jesus would
be the delayed bridegroom for instance. All members of the church as
portrayed as bridesmaids, waiting for the arrival. They all find it
hard to wait, and they all fall asleep. So, falling asleep isn’t
the issue, as they all share in that. No, the issue is the oil in the
lamps. Who is prepared for the delay and who is not?

No one knows what the
oil stands for, if this is an allegory. In Jewish tradition, the oil
could be faithful reading of the bible, and it could be a collection
of good deeds. Maybe they stand for spiritual disciplines, such as a
daily devotional. Either way, they show that we need to have them at
the ready in our character formation. It is hard to play catch up
with either of them, trying to make up for lost time. If we study our
bibles, if we build up our character by doing good, we can rely on
that when a surprise turns up. I think of the missionary captured in
Lebanon years ago. Denied a bible, he could recite the psalms from
memory. He hadn’t memorized them as we learn a poem in school.
He prayed them so much that they became part of him, and he was able
to turn to them in that critical period.

The time for decision
often comes at the worst possible moment, or at a time we least
expect. Temptation has a way of sneaking up on us. In our mortality,
no one knows the time of departure across the Jordan into the
Promised Land of heaven. Most of us will probably be brought into
God’s time before the return of Jesus. To live as if, a crisis
could come at any time is to live a life prepared. My dentist at the
IUSD is an Iraq Marine veteran. He tries to be prepared for the
expected but the unexpected as well. Recognize, adapt, and overcome,
he says. In that sense, Marines seem to live out the Boy Scout motto
of be prepared. When a couple is expecting their first child, they
spend time working on a nursery and building the crib. Toward the
end, they often have the bags already packed and in the trunk of the
car, just in case. We do well to have our spiritual bags packed,
ready for the call of God.

My computer was down. I will try to retype last Sunday's sermon and then post it ASAP

Deborah means bee (queen bee) but I wonder if it doesn't mean speaker (dabar=word)

I assume this passage is in the lectionary to get some well-needed female power.

God works through human decisions here.

Notice that the NIV has her holding court v. NRSV sitting under a palm tree named for her as a place of dispute-settlement.

Sh e is able to order Barak (blessed) around. (Barak could mean lightning as well.)Barak seems a bit timid.

I notice trouble though, as they only take 2 tribal troops.

We have historical issues. If indeed Israel swept through Canaan, how do thye have such a hold on power?

Notice the tantalizing hint about technological prowess (chariots fo iron) Did Israel lack the technology or the the structure to make chariots.
 If one wishes, woman power takes the stage at the end of the chapter with Jael (God is Yah(weh))

One could extend the reading to the poem at ch. 5, especially the end at 24 that is a taunt but is alos a remarkable way of seeing through the eyes of the enemy's mother.