When Haiti Hurts

A sermon by David A. Roquemore

The Camp Hill Presbyterian Church

January 17, 2010

Luke 13: 1-5

¹Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices.²Jesus answered, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? ³I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.⁴Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? ⁵I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”

I am changing the reading this morning, and changing the sermon from the announced text because of the events of this past week.  The earthquake in Haiti this past week brought with it human suffering  of an extraordinary degree.  How  will Haitians cope with this, how will they rebuild? Who will help them? We obviously will, as their most prosperous neighbor — what will we do? What will the rest of the world do? It was interesting that the first help to arrive came from Iceland. Iceland?

Beyond that, there are questions that have been raised in the public discourse about God’s role in this event.  Pat Robertson suggests that this destruction is God’s punishment on Haiti.  Something about that statement makes most of us react negatively; surely we don’t believe in a God who does that, do we? What does the Bible have to say to us about this? What do the various theological traditions of the Church, which over the years have reflected deeply on these matters, have to teach us or say to us?

Part of the trouble, and the reason why people might say the things that Mr. Robertson said, is that there are stories in the Old Testament in which God does send punishment on people for their evil behavior.  The Flood comes to wipe out the evil of humanity, though the story centers on the righteous man Noah and God’s promise not to do it again! There are other places, where certain people are punished, where they reap the result of their own evil. We can understand that. It’s when people receive evil they do not deserve that we are troubled. And so there seems to be a thread in the Bible that agrees with that theology of punishment.

In the gospels there are a few passages that point in a different direction.  In Luke we read of the questioners who wanted to know what Jesus thought about some tragedies of their day. Pilate had killed some Galileans as they made their sacrifices. A tower had fallen on some people, killing them. These are not the results of bad behavior; they are just the kind of senseless things that happen. What is God’s role in these things?

Here we see Jesus respond to the suggestion that God brings bad things to bad people. The disciples, and the others around Jesus, realized that the reality is otherwise, the reality is that bad things happen to –relatively– good people. I put “relatively” in there because bad or good we are all sinners. That is the point Jesus makes.

Jesus turns it around on his questioners. They are asking “those people died because they were bad, right?” And Jesus says, no, they died because bad things happen, and – listen to him — “unless you repent, you will perish too!” Jesus makes it clear that good and bad as we see them are relative terms. Jesus reminds us that we are all sinners, all in need of repentance, all  in need of repentance lest we die.  Jesus does not subscribe to a theology of punishment.

In Matthew there is another place similar to this.    Matthew 5 says, You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous

The sun rises and the rain falls on the righteous and unrighteous, the just and the unjust. God is impartial in the distribution of good. What we do with the good varies tremendously. What we understand to be a blessing varies tremendously. Whether we see the world as a coldly mechanical system, or the abode of God’s Spirit active in everything affects how we respond to God. When we DO understand everything as coming from God, then we can see God’s care even in the most dire circumstances.

Which is different than seeing everything that happens to us, good or bad, as the will of God. John Calvin, and our tradition of Presbyterianism generally, sees things that way. Calvin taught it, seeing it as a comfort in a very uncertain age. All things that happen do so because God ordains it that way. Even bad things.  But Calvin’s theological reasons for taking that position do not hold up, actually. We need not be so strident. God does not send evil upon us; the evil that comes on us comes because there is evil in the world. Yet even in the midst of the most unacceptable evil, we are able to sense the presence of God. The Cross means that God is always present in suffering, and God seeks to redeem and change all things, even evil things.

Never mind the misguided theology that says the earthquake was God’s punishment for something. Were God to start punishing those who do not follow his commands, a quick reading of the Old Testament prophets shows that we would be in grave danger ourselves. Amos thunders Woe to “You drink wine by the bowlful and use the finest lotions, but you do not grieve over the ruin of Joseph.” (6:6, a sample of many such verses)  Living in luxury without having mercy for the poor is a serious sin in Amos’ eyes, and Amos speaks for God! A columnist for a Minneapolis newspaper wrote a letter “from Satan to Pat Robertson” the other day, in which Satan says, “If I had a thing going with Haiti, there’d be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox — that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style.” I think that may be right – it might be those who have more than they know what to do with who are grave danger of being judged! All are in need of mercy, rich and poor, Haitian and Pennsylvanian. All cry out to God for mercy and God gives mercy to all.

So then what should we do? We can first of all pray for those people. We pray that each one will receive water, food, medical care, housing. We pray for them in their grief: most of them have lost loved ones, or neighbors; they have lost their homes and their way of life. We pray that they will have hope, will not despair, will see that even in the midst of this, God is with them.

Seeing the suffering in Haiti should bring us to our knees being thankful that we are not there, that this has not happened to us, that we have electric power, clean water, heat, shelter, medicine, safety, and order.  Despite our advantages, we are no better than those Haitians, and if we think we are, then we sin. We have a lot more than they do – we give thanks to God for our blessings.

At the same time, that very prayer brings up a question we’d rather not face: what if these advantages we have are the result of our own selfishness? What if God really doesn’t want us to be rich and others poor? What then should we do with our blessings? We should share them. God has given us much, and so demands much from us. Our generosity is not a choice; it is our calling. And so we give.

We give. Right now the needed thing is money, which the agencies can use to bring in what they need.  At some point we may be asked to give things that can be shipped in.  At some point there will be teams of people from all over the country going to Haiti to work, to help; right now, there is no infrastructure to support the people who live there, much less groups of volunteers. And so we send our money and we wait.

I have already said that you can give to this effort today.  Some have already come by the church and made donations. The Mission committee notified me on Thursday they were sending $2000 – that was sent Friday.  Thousands of people are giving online, with their phones – the speed with which we can give is amazing! Here is the thing: we have much, and God in a situation like this looks to see what we will do. Paying five dollars with our phone bill helps, yes, but that isn’t really much.  To put it bluntly, I would like to see us turn the Mission Committees $2000 into Twenty Thousand today! And we can do that, without much pain at all.  But will we do it? That’s the part that hurts.

We should learn from this. When a horrific calamity occurs, there is an outpouring of concern and giving and mercy. Where is that concern every day? Where is that mercy in ordinary times? Where is that giving to address the regular and routine needs that are always with us? Haiti shows us that we are all in this together, that we need one another. And we are reminded that need knows no season. There are people living in FEMA trailers even yet, more than four years after Hurricane Katrina.  Our Sudanese friends remind us that much of the human family lives in conditions we can’t imagine. In short, the needs in Haiti bring to focus what needs to be our way all the time: loving our neighbors in whatever way they need.

Jesus calls us to do this: to love neighbors in concrete ways, like giving them a drink of water, saying that when we do it, we are doing it to him. How can we do any less?

topical sermons like this have a way of wandering around. Let’s come back to the gospel reading from Luke:  those whom Pilate killed, those who died when the tower collapsed on them were no worse sinners than anyone else, even than ‘you’ Jesus says to his questioners. And then, rather than debate the mysteries of how evil can be, Jesus simply says, “you’d better be ready, lest the same thing happen to you.” You don’t know when some tower will fall on you, or somebody busy on their cell phone will run a red light and kill you, but you can know this: you can repent.

And so Jesus calls us to repent and live according to his commandments, to repent and live in his way, to repent and obey. Jesus calls us to repent our sin, which just might include our self-congratulations for our blessings. Jesus calls us to repent and be his faithful people.

And so the first thing to say today is, as we pray, repent and believe. If you have never taken Jesus seriously before, do it today.  His grace forgives all sin and gives us power to live as his people.

As we pray today, knowing what Jesus would say, let us repent of enjoying excess while others go hungry. We enjoy the good life, but is the good life really good? Is the good life really Christian? I know, that question hits way too close to home. But we need to pray about it. Haiti makes that starkly clear.

We continue praying. We give thanks to God for our blessings, for indeed we are blessed. We ask to show us how to rightly enjoy our blessings.

We pray today, and asking God to guide us as we give. What is God calling each of us to do and when? That needs some prayer.

And then we give from our hearts, and we continue to pray for those people. That each person will be supplied with water and food and medical care and shelter and comfort and hope.  That each of them will come to know Jesus. That each of us will come to know Jesus.

Thanks be to God! Amen.

Out of Deep Unordered Water

A sermon by

David Roquemore

Camp Hill Presbyterian Church

January 10, 2010

Luke 3: 15-17, 21-22

Today is the Baptism of the Lord, when we read the story of Jesus’ baptism and think about our own baptism and what it means in our lives. As some of you know this is a topic I have made my specialty, and I must confess I have afflicted some long and rather tedious discourses on some patient congregations, hoping that the people would share my enthusiasm. They didn’t. And so today, rather than succumb to that temptation yet looking for a way to talk about baptism in many of its dimensions and facets of meaning, I thought this hymn we are singing would be a good outline to use. Hymn 494 is the one, and if you want to look at it as we go along, that might be good too. It is said that the place where people really learn their theology is first of all in the hymns and songs of the Church: here is a good place to start.

Out of deep unordered water God created light and land.

This refers to the primeval water of chaos, as described in Genesis 1. The ancients believed that before there was anything, there was water. Creation was mostly the act of making a dry place, a kind of bubble, in the waters. Water is uncontrollable and frightening to these desert-wandering Hebrews. The ocean to them frequently represents the wild untamed chaotic forces in the world, forces which the gods of other nations try  to use to their advantage, or control, but forces of which the Hebrews claimed “our God created them.” Deep water doesn’t scare God!

World of bird and beast and, later, in God’s image, woman, man.

God created dry land and daylight. God made the world and all that is in it. God made the dry land, all the plants, all the creatures. God made the things that fly in the air above the land, and even the things that swim in the seas. God made all the creatures, and each day, he would clap his hands and shout “Good!” at the sight of what he had made.

How long did it take? Who knows! The important part is that God did it. How God did it might be endlessly debated; that God did it is an article of faith.

God created all the creatures, and finally, woman and man. Now, the traditional  way of reading the creation stories takes this creation as a hierarchical thing, that man is superior to woman. I would urge you to read this again: in Genesis 1, it simply says that God created Adam in the image of God, “male and female he created them.” Adam is a word that means roughly “earthling” one created from the earth. Adam is humanity; someone said “God created humans from the humus.” God creates us male and female. God creates us in two kinds, to be equal partners in his praise and service, tending the garden he created. Of course, it all went wrong, but that is another hymn.

So the creation itself is creation that starts in the water. The Holy Spirit broods over the face of the primeval waters. The Spirit moves, and God speaks, and the Word creates. There is light. There is land. There is blooming bursting confusion and life!

There is water in the river bringing life to tree and plant.

Genesis describes a mythical garden, where the rivers run, where the tree of life stands. This is the center of creation, now lost to us. Revelation describes this same river and tree in the city of God, when all is restored. Psalm 46 says there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God. The water gives life! What is this water? The river of the water of life, the living water, is Jesus Christ. He is the one who gives life, and who will give us all life eternal.

Verse two. Water on the human forehead, birthmark of the love of God.

And so we baptize. We place water on the forehead.  Now let’s talk about style for a moment. We have these arguments in Church history, whole libraries full of volumes debating at what age one should be baptized, or how much water should be used. Is it a valid baptism if one is not dunked? Some of our brothers and sisters in Christ would say no. There are volumes of instruction on who should be baptized, when, with how much water, and what should be said. The most interesting one by far is a rule which advises baptism be done at dawn on Easter, in a river, with the candidates naked, women and children going into the river first. That might be quite a spectacle!  The best advice is the oldest, from the first century of the Church, which simply says baptize in cold running water, and if no cold water be found, then in lukewarm, and if no running water be found, then in a pool, and if there isn’t enough for immersion, then by pouring. You get the idea; the amount of water does not matter!

The water we place is the birthmark of the love of God, says our hymn. What a lovely image! We are marked by God’s love, we are sealed with his Spirit in baptism. An ancient custom mostly lost to Protestants was the anointing with oil of a person just after baptism, as a sign of the Holy Spirit coming upon us in baptism. In the ancient Church, and in the East, those who are baptized are anointed with oil, and then taken to the Table and fed bread and wine, even newborns. We remember the Trinity when we baptize, and when we remember the Trinity, we recall that God is love. God exists in the love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father, and both for the Spirit, and so on. God’s very life is love. And this baptism is a sign of that love to us: as we are baptized in Christ so we are baptized into this loving life of God. Just as a watermark on a piece of paper indicates its genuineness, so the watermark on our lives indicates that we are God’s own, and that he loves us.

Is the sign of death and rising; through the seas there runs a road.

Here the hymn takes two symbols of salvation. One is from Romans 6, where Paul compares being lowered into the water of baptism with being buried. Baptism by immersion is, for Paul, a picture of being buried with Christ. Read those verses and you will see that we are united with Christ in his death and so as we are raised out of the water, we are raised with him. We are given new life. Baptism acts out our salvation for us.

The other symbol of salvation is the rescue of the Hebrews from the Egyptian army at the Red Sea. The waters parted, and the Hebrews crossed to dry land, then the waters engulfed the pursuing chariots. Horse and rider were thrown into the sea, and the people saved by God’s mighty arm. Read about that in Exodus 14 and 15.

God saves his people. The water of baptism is the water of salvation.

Standing round the font reminds us of the Hebrews’ climb ashore. Life is hallowed by the knowledge: God has been this way before.

God has been this way before. God was with the Hebrews in the water, seeing to it that they could pass through without being swept away. God rescued and delivered them in water. God has been through the water of baptism before: the baptism by John of which we read in the gospel; the baptism of death and resurrection, being buried and rising again.  We stand at the font remembering the stories that tell us how God acts to save us, and we know that we are on a road which God himself has trod.

That God has been this way before indicates the true miracle and mystery of our faith, the miracle and mystery we celebrated just weeks ago at Christmas, that God became man. That God became one of us. That God shared, in the person of Jesus, all the pain and trouble, all the joys and sweetness, all the temptations and hungers, of what it means to be one of us. Whatever you face, whatever road you are on, God has been this way before. Take heart!

And the chorus ends, finally: Let creation praise its giver: There is water in the font.

As we celebrate baptisms  we remember all of these different meanings. Baptism alludes to all kinds of things in scripture. It has layers of meaning and different interpretations. It is the most postmodern of our ancient customs. And so we recall all of these facets of it as we stand at the font.

There is water in the font. The water is the Living Water, Jesus Christ, who said that he came to give us life, who promised that whoever drinks of this water will never thirst, who washes us clean and sustains us day by day. The font is the Fountain, the Fountain of All Good, as John Calvin frequently called God. God is the Source and Font from which all good things, all blessings flow. All the good gifts of God’s grace flow from his hand as a stream pours forth from a spring. The water in this font is the living water of Christ, and here it is poured out for us all.

Remember your baptism and be thankful! Alleluia! Amen.

Who Is Jesus? A King for Wise Men

A sermon by David Roquemore

Camp Hill Presbyterian Church

January 3, 2010

Matthew 2: 1-12

Today we read the lessons for Epiphany, which is always January 6, the twelfth and last day of Christmastide. An epiphany is a manifestation, a revelation. It is a time when, in the midst of everyday experience, one suddenly finds oneself in the unmistakable presence of God. The coming of the wise men to see the child Jesus is an epiphany – it is a moment when the identity of the child is revealed to the world.

About these wise men. I am reminded of the comedian whose favorite line is, “the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Discuss.”  The usual image we have is simple: three wise kings who arrive on camels at midnight from the East. Let’s discuss.

The idea that they were kings comes from the kingly gifts they brought. But the text doesn’t give us any indication they were kings. They were “magi” – word from which we get “magician.” They were Persian priest-scholars.They studied the philosophy, religions, mathematics, astronomy, astrology texts of the ancient world. All of these would be loosely characterized as “wisdom,” and they would all be considered more or less the same subject.  So these are people who have studied the prophecies and learning of the ancient world, who know the lore and mysteries, who see in the sky a sign that leads them to believe something significant has taken place in Jerusalem. They take it seriously, for they make the trip, and, we note, Herod and the scribes in Jerusalem take it seriously as well.

They were familiar with the prophecies of a Savior and King, and especially the words of the prophet Balaam, also from the East, which we read in Numbers 24:17: “A star shall rise out of Jacob.”  They knew the traditions of the Jews, for since the Exile several centuries before, there had been communities of  Jews in the East. And so seeing the star, they go to Jerusalem. As an ancient hymn puts it, Those who worshipped the stars were taught by a star to adore thee.

The tradition of the Church names them Gaspar, Melchior and Balthasar. They were baptized into the Christian faith many years later by the Apostle Thomas, who was on his way to preach the Gospel in India. You don’t have to believe that, but you should believe that they went away from this encounter changed: even though he is only a child, they have met the Savior of the World. No doubt they waited and wondered for years, hoping for more news about the child.

They bring three gifts, gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Three to remind us of the Holy Trinity. Three to symbolize the threefold nature of Christ’s ministry as prophet, priest, and king. All of these are costly, all luxurious and rare. It would not be customary for people of Joseph’s and Mary’s status to have a supply of these things. These gifts reveal who the baby is. Gold is fit to offer a king. Christ’s natures are revealed in the offering of frankincense fit to offer God, and myrrh, for God who is to suffer and die. Incense has long been used in the church as a symbol of prayers, as the Scripture says in Psalm 141:2. Incense then indicates God. Myrrh is used as a burial spice, put in the shroud as it is wrapped around the body to make it smell better. Myrrh then indicates that this one is human, and will suffer death like all of us do.

Thirdly, while the miraculous star may have indeed been timed to bring them on the very night of the birth, the text indicates that Herod killed all the children under two years old, “according to the time the wise men told him.” We may conclude they came much later than the original Christmas night.

Much has been made of the star. Some try to align the date of Jesus’ birth with the known occurrences of various astronomical conjunctions that the Magi might have thought were signs. Some have said the star is this or that alignment of planets and moons. Some have even said it was a UFO. Whatever it was, it was taken as a sign by those who were very wise. We would do well not to dismiss signs that lead us to God. One ancient insight says that just as God led his people through the wilderness toward the promised land in a pillar of fire by night and cloud by day, so God led these outsiders to the savior by a star. John Chrysostom, a 4th century preacher of great renown, said that God uses a star large enough to astonish even the astronomers, and uses it to lead them away from their errors and toward the Truth, toward true wisdom.

What do we get from this story? Aside from the notion that we give gifts because the wise men did, what do we learn?

This story represents the first moment when God’s plan of salvation is revealed to be broader than previously thought. These wise men come to pay tribute and worship the newborn king. He is not born in the royal house, though his lineage, as Matthew goes to great lengths to show, is of the house of David. Jesus is born to be a king. For these wise men, these Gentile scholars, to come and bend the knee to this child reveals that his kingdom includes all people, not only the people of Israel. This child is savior for the world, and that is revealed to us by the visit of these wise men. The messiah comes to fulfill God’s promises to the Jews, but there is more. The messiah also comes as Savior of the world, who brings salvation to outsiders, to Gentiles, to us.

The gifts and the signs and the trip of these visitors all indicate that this child is different. They give us the news that he is king, and that is he is a priest and prophet, that he will suffer and die. They show us who he is, if we are willing to see the signs. Like the wise men who trusted the signs enough to follow them across the desert, are we willing to follow the signs and proclamation, to be his disciples in our lives?

Are we willing to bring our gold to him? Do we trust God in this new year to provide for our needs, to give us our daily bread, and so bring our offerings freely?

What about our worship? Do our prayers rise like incense before God? Prayer is the life of faith. To bring our prayers before him daily is our worship and our service. In this new year, let us praise and worship him each day.

What about myrrh, the symbol of suffering – are we at all willing to suffer, to sacrifice, to be changed? His suffering is our salvation – for that we should give thanks each day.

And so like those wise men of old, let us bow the knee before our King, let us bring our gifts, costly and rare, let us commit our lives to the service of Jesus the king.

To God be all glory and honor and power and blessing, now and forever. Amen.

Who Is Jesus? A Threat for Herod

A sermon by David Roquemore

Camp Hill Presbyterian Church

December 27, 2009

Jeremiah 31: 15-17

Matthew 2: 13 – 18

This story from Matthew is the part of the Christmas story we often skip. We read about the wise men, how they were told in a dream that Herod was evil, and how they went home by another way. But then we often skip the offensive verses that tell this offensive tale, how innocent children are killed as Herod attempts to get rid of the rumored Christ child.

To look at this part of the story raises political questions, and we find ourselves right in the middle of the complicated task of political theology; that is, how do we live together in the polis while living together as God’s gathered community? How do the two fit together, or do they?

Luke in his gospel account tells us that Jesus is born when Caesar Augustus orders a census. The contrast is clear: Caesar is in Rome ordering people around, while Jesus is born in a stable in a remote corner of the world. And yet, which one is supreme? Which one is ruler of the universe? Not Augustus, despite his titles.

Matthew makes it even more clear. Herod is threatened. Herod is the king. He is subservient to Rome; his kingdom is a part of the empire, and he cannot make decisions independent of the Roman governor, but for the most part, the Romans let him rule. That way, the local authorities are pacified. So Herod is king. He is known in history as quite the evil king. Caesar himself said of Herod he would rather be his pig than his son, for Herod had his sons killed, lest they try to take the throne away. There were by the way several Herods. It was a different Herod who ruled when Jesus died.

Herod is king, and he understands intuitively that any birth accompanied by signs sufficient to bring wise men from the East is a significant birth. This child is a rival. This child will take away his kingdom. He is a threat. Who is Jesus? One answer is, he is a threat to Herod. A threat to those in power.

Worldly power is always threatened by God’s power. Those who would rule find themselves faced with the question of submitting their rule and their power to God’s power and rule. Scripture says that one day, every knee will bow to Jesus Christ as Lord, whether they choose to or not. Whether they want to submit or not, it will happen, because God has given all authority to him. As our Christmas reading from Isaiah says, “government will be upon his shoulders.”

There have been times when the powers that be have tried to stamp out the perceived threat of Christians: the first century, the various persecutions under some of the Roman emperors, the communist regimes of our own time. That is one way that the powers have tried to deal with the threat.

Another way of dealing with Christ has been to co-opt the faith and the Church to the service of the powers. In many ways the history of Europe in the Middle Ages is a story of how the Church and civil power became one, or nearly so, in an attempt at a “Christian society” or Christendom. When we read this story, we are often amazed at the things that were done in the name of Christ: the civil power corrupts the Church every time!

In some ways even in our time this has happened. We read in the scripture the admonitions to live peaceably with neighbors, and to honor the emperor. Good advice! When the Church takes that advice to the point that civic life becomes identified with faith, then look out! The Church has been domesticated and has become the emperors loyal servant. When that happens, reformation cannot be far behind.

So the Church and the King live in tension with each other. We do want to live peaceably with the civil government, while at the same time we must beware the tendency of the magistrate to forget its proper role. John Calvin said of these matters,

as we have just now pointed out that this kind of government is distinct from that spiritual and inward Kingdom of Christ, so we must know that they are not at variance. For spiritual government, indeed, is already initiating in us upon earth certain beginnings of the Heavenly Kingdom, and in this mortal and fleeting life affords a certain forecast of an immortal and incorruptible blessedness. Yet civil government has its appointed end, so long as we live among men, to cherish and protect the outward worship of God, to defend sound doctrine of piety and the position of the church, to adjust our life to the society of men, to form our social behavior to civil righteousness, to reconcile us with one another, and to promote general peace and tranquility. (Institutes, IV, xx, 2)

Here we have a different political philosophy than the one that governs our civic discourse, but a fine vision of the relationship of the government and the church. It is clear in Calvin and many other theologians that the government is considered a gift of God, a mandate of God that exists to order our life.

Herod is threatened, mostly because Herod is an evil king. He will do anything to preserve his throne. Even killing the children of Bethlehem. Now, some scholar sat down with population information and infant mortality rates, and determined that, as best he could tell, the number of male children under two years old was likely twenty or thirty children. So this was not a massive slaughter. However, even with a relatively low number, by the standards of genocidal madness in our time, it does represent all the boys of that age. Weeping is heard in Bethlehem, for the loss of all these children.

Some may ask why the coming of Jesus brings this suffering.  The answer we give is that it is evil that brings the suffering of innocents in its wake. This is Herod’s doing. This is Herod’s work. Jesus the King who is born comes to bring life and salvation. Herod the King on the throne comes wielding a sword. The result of Herod’s feeling threatened is death to innocent victims. When the worldly power is threatened, and reacts, suffering is great. We have to look no further than our own newspapers to see this truth alive and well today.

Matthew does a marvelous job of bringing the story of Jesus into context by echoing things from the Old Testament. In the slaughter of the innocent children we are reminded of Pharaoh’s command that all male Hebrew babies be killed, the command that Moses’ mother disobeyed when she put him in the river in a basket where Pharaoh’s daughter would find him. We are reminded of the coming of the angel of death, taking all the first-born of Egypt, but passing over the houses of the Hebrews, on the night before the Exodus began. This Exodus, when the Hebrews left Egypt and crossed the Red Sea into freedom, is the major Old Testament event. It is the moment in the history of Israel that is looked back upon as the formative moment. God saved his people, and all stories of God start with that.

Matthew also ties Jesus’ birth to another moment of salvation in the history of Israel. When the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem in 586 BC, they did as victorious armies almost always do, destroying mostly everything in their path and taking the people captive. In that crisis, the prophet Jeremiah speaks. How could God let Jerusalem be destroyed? Is God dead, the people wondered. No, said Jeremiah; God will yet save us. Matthew quotes a passage that laments the death of the children of Rachel, but goes on to promise that God will redeem his people. Even in the terror of captivity, there is hope.

Weeping is heard in Ramah. Rachel weeps for her children. The mothers of Bethlehem cry out for their dead sons, even as Joseph and Mary escape into Egypt with Jesus. In a kind of reversal of the Exodus, Jesus is rescued by going back to Egypt, where he will hide until things are safe. But for now, the mothers weep. The pain of these innocents is real. They represent all the innocents in all of history, the ones caught in the crossfire of history, the ones we see in lines along the roadways, refugees in the midst of conflict. They are the ones in our newspapers, wailing and mourning the ones killed in the latest blast of bombs. Rachel weeps for her children, and still weeps, for innocents killed in wars, in violence of every kind.

But this suffering is not the will of God. It is the will of Herod. The will of God, the promise of God, is that suffering will end. The will of God is that evil be eradicated and every tear wiped away. The promise of God is that the exiles will be brought back home, those who mourn will be comforted, those in pain will be soothed, those in need will be fed, those in any kind of trouble will find rest. The promise of God is that the innocent will not suffer, but will be welcomed and cared for by the Good Shepherd himself.

Sometimes when we hear and see our Christmas greetings of “peace on earth” it is quite hard to reconcile them with the world as it really is, full of strife and violence. I am reminded of the great Christmas episode on the television show Kojak years ago. Telly Savalas was Detective Kojak. He worked on Christmas Eve, all night long, helping innocents who were suffering, arresting those who would work violence and evil. After a long night of this pain, he walked outside on Christmas morning, took the ever-present lollipop out of his mouth and said, “Love thy neighbor baby.”

But Jesus comes that the world truly will have peace and an end to suffering. But look, he does not bring it by fiat, by mandate. No, he suffers as well. The suffering of the innocents in Bethlehem foretells Jesus’ fate: he too will suffer at the hands of a Herod. He will suffer and die, an innocent victim of threatened political power. But in his suffering we have life. In his suffering we have peace. In his suffering the promises of God are made known and fulfilled.

So whatever we suffer, we know that in Christ we have one who understands and knows our pain, who will vindicate the innocent and bring justice. That is the hope we have.

Thanks be to God. amen.

A Savior, Who is Christ the Lord

A sermon by

David A. Roquemore

Camp Hill Presbyterian Church

December 24, 2009

Luke 2: 1-20

Throughout the Advent season, we have asked the question, “who is Jesus?” and answered it from the perspective of the characters in the story. We will continue to do that for another week or two. Tonight we focus that question again: who is Jesus? The angel proclaims him to be the Savior, the one who is promised, the one to whom the prophecies point, the one who saves us from our sins, the Son of God.

I am struck by that line at the end of this reading, “Mary pondered all these things in her heart.”

Here is Mary:

• amazed by the message of the angel
• afraid of what others, including Joseph, will think
• blessed by Elizabeth who is carrying the infant John
• forced to travel a long way while pregnant
• suffering her travail and labor in a stable
• exhausted from the day she has had
• surprised by shepherds
• filled with wonder at their testimony

What a time she has had! What a wild emotional ride this has been! She sits and looks at the baby, remembering. She cries, tears of exhausted hope.

And it isn’t over. There is much to come that she will ponder: when Jesus was 12 and he was lost in the traveling group departing Jerusalem. What did she think when she found him lecturing the scholars in the temple?

What did she think at the family wedding, when he changed hundreds of gallons of water into first-rate wine, even after telling her he wouldn’t?

What did she think when he was grown, when people thought he was a little nuts? She and the others went to find him and bring him home, but he wouldn’t come.

What did she think later still, when he was hanging on the cross, telling her that John the Beloved Disciple would take care of her from now on?

On that other night years later, Mary would ponder some more. The night after he was crucified, she would sit up late, remembering. She remembers the birth, and all the strange things that go with it. She remembers him running around, a happy little boy. She remembers his wit and wisdom, the things he did and said. She would remember and cry, that night, bitter tears of unfulfilled hope.

After the resurrection, she would cry yet again, tears of joy. She would cry not only for her Son, but for her Lord. At that moment, it would all begin to make sense: all the things that she had pondered would come together for her. All that Mary ponders are the signs that this boy is different. His knowledge, his grace, his ministry, his message, his miracles – all of them point to the mystery, the secret, the truth: he is God become man. He is God with us. In Jesus, God lives among the creatures!

The point to ponder: in Jesus God is incarnate. In Jesus God becomes a man. In Jesus God acts to save us. Were Jesus only a man, he would be in the same boat as we are: alienated from God, lost in sin. Were Jesus only God, he would not be one of us, not like us, not able to reach us.  But he is both: he is human and he is God. He is the point of contact. He takes our humanity and redeems it. The ancients said, “he became as we are so that we might become as he is.” (Irenaeus) In Jesus, God enters our human world fully. In Jesus God shows that he is not a far-off distant deity, not a God who watches like some mildly interested spectator, not a God who sees but is not moved. In Jesus God shows that he is passionately, intimately, deeply involved with human life. God wants to be a part of our lives, and in Jesus God shares our lives, our pain, our joys, our burdens, the daily trials of simply keeping hearth and home together. God is not detached and distant; he is here. God is not unconcerned and “busy;” he knows your every thought and need. God is not mad at you, does not refuse you; he is calling you to come and enjoy his love. That is the gift God gives at Christmas.

Christmas is celebrated when the winter days are at their shortest, just as they begin to lengthen again. St. Gregory of Nyssa says this is to remind us that the coming of Christ is the coming of the Light into the world. In a time of darkness and fear, in a time of the world’s darkness, we proclaim the hope that the Light has come. Christ has come, and the world now lives in the light of his truth, his grace, his goodness. The world has been given the gift of Christmas as well.

Of course the world doesn’t quite get it. The world doesn’t know it yet. I was at the mall this week. A frenzy of buying and shopping; every kind of trinket, knick-knack, and junk being bought as a gift for someone. The world is into getting presents, that much is sure. But does the world understand the gift? God gives Mary a Son. In him, God gives us himself. Not some widget from the store, but the gift of life itself.

And so we must try our hardest to fight against the darkness: we must proclaim that God gives Light and Life, that here on this night all has changed. We must reinterpret Christmas. One often hears a reference to the “true spirit of the season,” but those references are usually wrong! The true spirit of the season is the Spirit of Christ, who gives himself, even to death, for the life of the world.

And so we gather in this darkness, to light a candle. We take bread and a taste of wine, to remember his death. We light candles, to remember his life. We stare into the light and realize that he is not dead: he lives among us. He is alive, the Risen Lord, and his light shines in our hearts and our lives and our time. We are his witnesses. Let our light shine this night, this season, this year, that all may know the Gift that the Giver sends to all people.

Thanks be to God. Amen

Who Is Jesus? A Savior for Shepherds

A sermon by David Roquemore

Camp Hill Presbyterian Church

December 20, 2009

Micah 5: 2-5

Luke 2: 8-11

Who is Jesus? Today we hear the proclamation of the angels to the shepherds. Jesus is the Savior. He is a savior for the shepherds.

People in the ancient world had a sense of needing to be saved from something. There was a theme in most of the ancient religions that humankind needed to be delivered, rescued, saved from some condition. What precisely that was, and how it was accomplished, differed, but the underlying question was quite common. Saviors came in various guises: the ruler might be the savior, or a teacher, or anyone who brought health and freedom. The ancient world usually thought of salvation in terms of being saved from fate or from death.

In our time, the issue is not so much fate as it is emptiness, meaninglessness. Watch our movies, or more especially, music videos: there you will find abundant evidence that a key issue in our time is meaning and the lack of it. The postmodern sense that no particular meaning has priority has moved into the popular culture in a form that says, there is no meaning, period. The only meaning one can have is the meaning one creates.

What we are to be saved from, then, is lack of meaning and purpose. Perhaps when we encounter people who can’t seem to connect with or hear what the Church has to say, we should talk not so much in terms of being saved from sin, but rather of finding meaning and being given a purpose. Same salvific process; different description!

Who will save us? The angels proclaim to the shepherds that Jesus is the savior. Jesus is the one who will give our lives meaning, who will bring a purpose into our lives, who will make life worth living. Jesus is the one who will keep us from despair. He will save us.

Jesus is the savior – not Augustus! Savior was one of the titles sometimes used for the emperor, for Caesar. Luke is making the point that, in the middle of the great time of Roman Peace, it is this baby who will finally save the world. Jesus, not Caesar, will save us. That is something we might remember in these times of war and trouble. As right as our war is, as justified as it is, it is finally not war that will save us from terror. It is not violence that will end violence. It is not Caesar, not Augustus not the force of arms that will save us. Jesus will finally and ultimately save us. The way to end violence is to serve the Prince of Peace. In a world wanting to be rescued from terror, this is news!

That Jesus is the savior is Good News.

Why is the gospel so often thought of as bad news? We have moralized it, and made it schoolmarmish. Jesus won’t let us do anything fun! Which is to say, what we really want to do is pursue lust, gluttony, and drunkenness. We really want to do our own thing and have it our way. That, by the way, is a good definition of sin.

The gospel is not bad news. It isn’t that Jesus won’t let us do things. Rather, we want to do the wrong things, and we become trapped in the situations we create. But the gospel announces freedom to us. God brings freedom. God wants to change things for us. The freedom is not our idea, but God’s, and God wants it for every one of us.

And so if we believe the gospel is bad news, we haven’t really heard it. The gospel is the good news that God loves us and wants life to be full and blessed, even when it is difficult and we suffer.

There is much bad news, which I summarize as death, disease, and divorce.

Death can be the kind of bad news that punches us in the stomach and takes away all sense of reality, any sense of normalcy. Death leaves us with a gaping hole in our hearts, as someone we love has been taken away. Death can come as dreams die, as hope fades. When some part of our life, despite our best efforts, is destroyed, that is a death. There can be death of love, of hope, of joy. All of it is bad news.

Disease threatens us bodily. Our mortality looms before us. We too will die, maybe soon. We find ourselves stiffer than we used to be. We can’t move as easily. We have strange pains. We start looking at our family history with more interest: who died of what? We dread the diagnosis that condemns us to years of difficulty and suffering. We sometimes fear the disease more than the dying, and with good reason. Disease also comes in other ways, other forms of dis- ease, which rob life of the comfort and security we crave. Relationships at home or work become diseased.  Dysfunction abounds. All of it is bad news.

Divorce takes away what we had counted on, and what we had committed ourselves to. What we thought would always be there, isn’t. The one to whom we promised everything turns out not to be worth trusting at all. Now, a marriage is a promise, a very serious promise indeed, but nothing more. Divorce comes as one party or other or both break that promise. Despite all good intentions, promises cannot always be fulfilled. That happens in other areas of life: other kinds of separation afflict us. We are estranged from family members. We have a disagreement with partners or colleagues at work that leads to irrevocable separation. Bad news.

Life is filled with bad news, filled with grief.  But the grace of God overcomes all of this bad news.

After all, what does God do with death? He calls forth resurrection with a shout!

What does God do with disease? He brings healing in his wings.

What does God do with divorce? He overcomes separation and brings reconciliation and renewal.

Will your dead loved ones come back? No, but there is resurrection.

Will your disease go away? No, but in God’s kingdom there is nothing but health.

Will your beloved return to you? No, but in God’s house no estrangement is possible.

So we live not demanding miracles from our bad news, but seeing good news arise as hope. The hope of the gospel tells us that eventually, in God’s kingdom, all bad news will be banished and good news will abound.

What did the shepherd do when they heard this proclamation?

They ran from the fields into town to see the child. We all remember that. We know the story too well: they came, bringing the cutest little lamb, and knelt adoringly, two on the right, one on the left. Right? And there they sit, in the creche, forever frozen? No! They left the place where the child was and went back, glorifying and praising God. They told people what had happened, to the amazement of all who heard them.

What did the shepherds do with the good new? They shared it. They told people.

Now, you can call this evangelism. Or you can call it “outreach,” if you are squeamish. Or you can expand it and call it mission. Or you can call it, as someone did, one man dying of thirst telling another where to find water. Whatever you call it, it is what we are called to do! We are called to be “good news givers,” to tell the good news to people in the middle of their bad news.

There are Old Testament passages which describe a time when all debts will be erased and all imbalances corrected, and everyone will have all he needs and more. A time of God’s abundance. Now, in a world like this, a world of bad news, this probably wasn’t going to happen: the rich are not going to give up what they have for the poor, not without a fight. But perhaps, in the world that God promises to call into being, this just might be the truth of things. And for the moment, the only glimpse we have of that bright new world is here, in the Church.

The gospel is good news, and we can tell it that way. We can tell it as the same old boring news. Or we can read the Christmas story over and over until it becomes elevator music that we don’t really hear. Or we can find ways to let the power of this news break into our lives and spill over. You see, the good news that the shepherds heard tends to overflow your life, so that you have to tell others.

We have a call before us: to tell others about the worship services, the friendship and fellowship we find here, the learning and the fun. We are called to evangelism, or (for the squeamish) outreach. We are also called to mission. The mission of Jesus is to bring good news to the world, and that good news often takes very concrete forms. Like building houses, giving out toys, paying rent, listening to another’s problems, righting wrongs, calling on Caesar to change things. This year we are called to mission, to new and greater and more active mission, here in our streets and abroad.

In these ways, we are called to become “good news givers.”

The gospel is good news, and good news brings hope. No matter what your bad news is.

Thanks be to God! Amen.

Who Is Jesus? A Problem for Joseph

A sermon by David A. Roquemore

Camp Hill Presbyterian Church

Camp Hill, PA

December 13, 2009

Matthew 1: 18-25

Who is Jesus? Well, for Joseph he is a problem. Jesus is a problem for Joseph.

But look carefully: be sure you see the real problem. You see, the pregnancy itself is troubling, yes, and it is a problem. The reading says that Joseph was trying to decide what to do about it. He wanted to “put her away quietly, for he was a just man.” According to the Law, he could break off the marriage plans if she were pregnant. He could send her home in disgrace, but she might well be kicked out of her father’s house as well, disowned, alone, and vulnerable. Or Joseph could publicly accuse her, and she might be stoned to death at the city gates. Either way, it won’t be easy for Joseph to keep the truth quiet. Eventually people will know why Joseph cancels the marriage, if he does so. What to do? That is Joseph’s initial problem.

But the real problem is the message the angel brings. Once the angel comes, he has a larger problem. The angel identifies the child as the Messiah. Should Joseph believe this? What will anyone else say? Will they believe him? You see Joseph going to the gathering place in the village, and saying to his friends, “you won’t believe what I just learned!” And he would be right, they won’t believe him. Joseph has to decide if anyone will believe this. But that isn’t all. Joseph has to decide, as do we all, if he believes it! This child is, well, a problem!

Joseph is told to name the child Jesus, for he will save the people from their sins. This is a pun in Aramaic. Jesus is Yeshua; it is the same name as Joshua. The name comes from the verb “to save.” So, his name will be “savior” for he will save the people from their sins. We don’t have a word that works in English for this concept. It is as if the angel said to Joseph, you will name him Sonny, because he will be the Son of God. That sounds too flippant, though.

What did Joseph think about this? What exactly did the people in his day expect of the Messiah? That depends on whom you talk to; some expected a heavenly savior to come from the sky. Others expected a revolutionary to arise and lead a rebellion against the superpowers. To say that Jesus would save them from their sins, that is a new twist. To say this of a helpless baby, that is foolishness.

We don’t know much about Joseph. Aside from this story in Matthew, there is only the question asked later about the adult Jesus: is this not Joseph the carpenter’s son? Of course, that is not terribly helpful, because carpenter is the wrong image. In the original, the word means something more like artisan or builder. The Sunday School pictures of Joseph and Jesus making furniture, often in a Shaker style, are just wrong. More likely, they were builders, who used brick and stone and wood to make houses. That means he wasn’t especially poor, as things went in those days, nor was he wealthy.

We don’t know when Joseph died. The usual story is that he was older than Mary, because of the fact that he doesn’t seem to be around when Jesus is an adult. Some traditions say that he died shortly before Jesus started his public ministry. He reared Jesus with his other children, perhaps from an earlier marriage.

What we do know is simple: he was a just man. Ancient church traditions honor him as one who protected Mary and the baby from danger: from the dishonor of illegitimacy, from Herod, from other threats to his life. He cared for Mary and young Jesus. God chose Mary as just the right one to bear the child; Joseph was just the right man to be his father, and care for him. That is what we know, and that is what is important. He was a righteous man, one whom the angel could direct, who would obey the call of God, who trusted that this problematic message was true. He didn’t want to drag Mary to the city gates to be executed; he had mercy even when seemingly betrayed. He heard what God’s angel said, and against all odds, he believed it. He faced the problem of who Jesus is, and he had faith.

Jesus is a problem for us as well.

What are you going to do with the claim that Jesus is the messiah? That Jesus is really God? That is a question we each must deal with, a problem we all must face. The claim, of course, that Jesus is God, the very God who created the heavens and the earth, is staggering nonsense – unless it happens to be true. If it is, then everything is changed, and we have no choice but to believe. The resurrection is the crux of the matter: the resurrection is the sign and the proof that Jesus is God Incarnate, that in this man our sins are forgiven, and we are reconciled to God.  In the resurrection the claim and promise that Jesus is the savior is made real, and by that grace we are saved. And so we face the problem: will we believe?

When we say, Yes, “I believe,” the trouble is not over. The problem of Jesus faces us at every turn. The bracelets from several years ago, “What Would Jesus Do?” raise that problem. At each moment in life we are faced with the question and the problem of obedience and faithfulness. What will you do?

In class one time the professor had just begun the lecture when a tremendous noise arose in the stairwell outside the classroom. In a fit of anger he went flying out the door, down the stairs, chewing them out as he went. He was rather famous for his temper. We all quietly prayed that he would not take it out on us! After a minute he returned, picked up a piece of chalk. He stood there grinding it into the blackboard, until at last he said, “sometimes you just wish it weren’t true.” Then he went back outside, found those noisy people, and asked forgiveness.

What will we do with each moment, if we are following Jesus? Will we let our angry words and unkind actions stand, or will we seek forgiveness and reconciliation? The life of faith is a life of constant problem, as we face our own sinfulness creeping in at every turn. We are constantly thrown up against what the Scriptures call “the deceitfulness of our own hearts.” Our sin.

Just as my professor found, we all face our sin daily. We say something unkind. We hear of a need and don’t care. We go all day long dealing with our needs and our business, without a thought of God or the Lord Jesus Christ. We are tormented by our appetites and desires. We are enslaved by fear, jealousy, old hurts. We react to people based on these things, and so our own pains lead us to further hurt others. These are things that happen every day. And so every day we need to remind ourselves – be it through prayers, readings, music, or whatever, — that we have committed ourselves to following Jesus. We submit ourselves to him, to be schooled by the Holy Spirit so that we will become more Christlike day by day. Yes, following Jesus is a problem, but it is worth the effort.

Joseph is thrown into a situation not of his choosing. He can’t have been thrilled. In Orthodox icons of the Nativity, Joseph is often pictured down in the corner, being talked to by someone. He has his head in his hands and looks glum, even despairing. What will become of me? What will people think?

You see, the temptation to worry about what others think, the temptation to let social pressure override the call of God is very great. Joseph is called by God to this task, but if he does it, he risks dishonor. People might even laugh at him. And if he doesn’t not accept God’s call, he has to do something about Mary, and all the options are bad, as we saw.

When we are worried about social standing and what others think, we can find ourselves distracted from what and who God is calling us to be. Flannery O’Connor once said, “you shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you Odd.” The Truth, Jesus Christ, will impact our lives and make us different. People might talk. They might notice. Not all of them will react kindly. Faith might even make us suffer; it might be hard.

Probably be easier to forget the whole business, wouldn’t it? I remember the woman who was frustrated that she couldn’t get her Presbyterian Women’s Circle to talk in the Bible Study. One day it was especially quiet, and so she shut the book, and said, “who cares. None of it is true anyway.” THAT got them talking!

We can’t forget it; once Jesus has touched our lives, we can’t get away from him. There is no place we can go to escape him. The angel says to Joseph that he will save his people from their sins, and if you want to be saved from sin, well, it takes work. If we want to be saved from sin, we need to see that this means changing, and once we are changed, we will be different, like Christ and not like the world.

God in Jesus Christ intends to change the world. To transform it. To redeem it. That means it will be different. And so if we are comfortable with the status quo, if we don’t want to see the world changed, if we don’t want to see justice for the developing world and people down the street, if we don’t want to get involved with our neighbors, if we don’t want to love others. – in short, if we don’t want to be a part of God’s program, then Jesus will be a problem for us, as he was for Joseph.

I suspect Joseph still had some questions. I bet he still had some doubts about what this all meant. But like his namesake centuries before, Joseph obeyed the message he heard in his dream. He obeyed the command of the Lord. He did what God told him. He accepted the challenge of this problem, and he lived before God in faith, a righteous man. May it be so with us!

Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Promise for the Prophets

A sermon by David Roquemore

Camp Hill Presbyterian Church

December 6, 2009

Luke 2:25-32

Imagine five hundred years ago, please. The year John Calvin was born, as it happens, 1509, the eve of the Reformation. Do you know what happened that year, who was king of England or France? Who was Pope? (Henry VIII, Louis XII, Julius II)

Go back another five hundred years. The year 1009 – anyone? We have no idea. You get the point. We don’t have a long memory as a culture.

The Hebrews were different. They celebrated things that happened a thousand years before. They remembered promises made in the dim distant past. They were still upset about the Exile — five hundred years before our reading, the kingdom of Judah had been taken into exile in Babylon. How could God let this happen? That still bothered people in the time of Jesus.

But they had these promises that things would be different.

The prophets said that a Messiah will come and redeem the people. One will come who will change everything. Deserts will bloom like gardens. Mountains will be laid low. Valleys will be filled. Roads will run easily through the wilderness of the countryside. Ancient enemies will be reconciled. Debts will be canceled. Slaves will be set free. All will be well. Peace will reign. The Messiah will come. God will rule over us from the throne, and the whole earth will gather to sing God’s praises. This is the vision we see in the prophets’ promises.

When Cyrus the Mede, king of the Medes and the Persians, conquered Babylon, he allowed the exiles to return home. The Old Testament goes so far as to call him God’s anointed, God’s messiah! Such was the joy of being set free – surely this was the hand of God.

And yet the oppression continued. The Medes and Persians didn’t set the people free. Israel remained a vassal state. Alexander the Great conquered the known world, and God’s people fell under Greek rule. A few decades before Jesus was born it was the Romans who took control. The names changed, but the situation remained pretty much the same for hundreds of years: foreigners ruled, and God’s people were not free. For hundreds of years, the promises of the prophets were read and reread. Could God have meant another sort of king? Will there be a political leader who will arise and throw off the foreign yoke? When will Messiah come and who will Messiah be?

Into such a world Simeon is born. He dedicates his life to these promises. He has read them his whole life long, and now, Simeon is an old man. He has waited his entire life for the Messiah to come. Now he sees him. The baby Jesus is brought to the temple for a blessing. When Simeon sees the child, God reveals to him that this indeed is the One. Simeon can die happy. Now let your servant depart in peace, he says, for I have seen the Promised One.

What does Simeon teach us by his life and example?

Simeon has lived his life in the hope of the God’s promised future. Simeon has faith that, despite all appearances to the contrary, God will keep his promises. Simeon trusts that God’s promises are true.

What about you? Do you believe that God’s promises are true? Do you count on them? Do you see these things as truths to live by, or as some stories with nice moral lessons?  To count on God’s promises is to live in hope, and that changes everything.

Perhaps you have seen or read Becket’s play Waiting for Godot. Here we have two men waiting for the coming of the mysterious Godot. Godot has promised to come, and the two are compelled to wait. But they do not live in hope. They have no faith that he will really come. They are prisoners, afraid to leave, but convinced he will not come. Kind of like when you are waiting on the appliance repairman.

Waiting on God’s promised future is not like that. We are not prisoners. Indeed, the promises set us free! We are given a new perspective and new priorities through our hope. We live knowing, however unthinkable this present age may be, God will inaugurate a new age that will make all things new. The ancient promises will surely be fulfilled. And we shall rejoice. That expectation spills over from the future into the present and fuels our expectation. It gives us joy right now, as we look forward to the day.

That is the first learning: God keeps his promises, however long the fulfillment seems to be in coming.

Worship centers on God’s action in Jesus Christ. We read the Word and hear the story. We celebrate the grace of God given to us in Jesus Christ, in whom all the promises are fulfilled. We remember his life and death and resurrection. But the story is not only about memory. It is also about hope. We remember, and we also remember that he promised to come again, that he is the One who will redeem the promises. We find an expectation that we will gather at God’s table, with all the saints, with Dick Ulp and Mary Jane Edwards and Ruth Shaw, and all the others. We worship, and find hope, of the future that is surely to be.

Hope is not just wishing for something that might be, or wishing things could be different knowing they won’t ever change. Hope is real – hope is the expectation that what God has said is true, and will come to pass. Hope is faith leaning into the future. Living in hope means seeing things in a new way. I saw a sign recently that said Christmas is a reason not to despair. Wonderful! Hope is the opposite of despair; despair literally means “without hope.” And so hope gives us meaning in a world that has given up. When you are tempted to give up, have hope: trust God’s future that will surely be.

That is the second learning: hope is the way of life we live, trusting the future God will bring.

Simeon lived in service of the hope that God promises. He was moved to action by that hope. He waited each day in the temple. He praised God. He meditated on the promises. He looked for the Messiah. He probably pestered each family, each set of parents who brought a baby to the Temple.

You know that new parents are rather particular about their baby, especially the first baby. They won’t let just anyone hold it, or touch it. These days they probably won’t even go out, for fear of a flu virus. I remember a woman who just HAD to hold the baby, and what a struggle it was to prevent her from grabbing the child out of my hands and wandering off with it. So think then, what must these parents have thought in the temple, with old Simeon trying to get a look at each child, asking strange questions and going on about God’s promises.

He was always on the watch for the coming one. The hope led him to act. We live in hope. We are moved to action. What we do here in worship is done in service of that hope. We worship, we praise God. We serve others, one another, the poor and the sick, in the service of God. All of our mission and ministry, all of our activities, flow from this hope, just as Simeon’s vigil did.

This vigil, what effect did it have on Simeon? St. Luke tells us that he was “righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel.” This vigil, this living in hope, constantly led Simeon to focus on God, to think about the promises, to draw him toward God. And that in turn made him righteous.

There is a sense in the word “righteous” of “being made straight, being straightened out.” Simeon’s constant exposure to and meditation on the Word of the promises kept him straight. It turned him always to the things of God, so that he was purified day by day.

Remember the Lord of The Rings? If you have read those books or watched the movies, you know about the ring – it has great power, and tempts all who see it. Those who wear it, no matter how good they be, are slowly turned to evil. The character Gollum in that story is a little creature that had played with the ring for years and years, and had been slowly transformed into a grotesque and bitter animal. The constant exposure to evil degraded him.

It is that way with us. Constant exposure to something bad will have a negative effect on us. Constant exposure to good will improve us, if we are willing. Simeon’s desire to see the promise of God come to pass makes him righteous, strengthening his devotion in an endless loop of reinforcement, until he finally is allowed to see the child.

Righteousness is not just doing the right things, though that is part of it. It is not obeying the rules or behaving a certain way, though that comes with it. It is not just knowing the right words or saying the right things. Righteousness begins in a burning desire for God. Simeon’s desire to see God’s Messiah makes him righteous, makes him good.

For us, having that desire to see and to know Jesus, to know God’s Savior, to know God’s promised one, — that is where our righteousness begins. Without that desire, the rest of it is lifeless; with that desire, faith is set aflame with hope.

Simeon heard the promises that God made through the prophets, the promises that empowered him to stay in the temple all those years, looking for the Messiah. They are the same promises that enable us today to join Simeon, and say that, in Jesus Christ, we have seen the promised one, we have met the Messiah, we have been set free, we have come face to face with God. That is our hope. That is our faith. That is our promise.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

What Do I Do Now?

A Sermon by

David A. Roquemore

Camp Hill Presbyterian Church

November 1, 2009

Ruth 1: 1-18

Mark 12: 28-34

For the last few Sundays we have studied the book of Job, and reflected on how suffering affects faith, how faith reacts to suffering, and in general what to do about bad things as they come. Today we might say we are moving ahead into the concreteness of spiritual life. We talk about faith, but specifically, what are we to do?

The scribes came up asking Jesus which is the greatest commandment.   Make no mistake about it; despite what you may have heard about the scribes and Pharisees, they are the good guys. Years of preaching may have given you the notion that they are the bad guys; if so, let’s have a new paradigm. They are the good guys. They are the best religious people around. And this Jesus is an upstart Galilean teacher without credentials. Jesus actually agrees with them on the whole, but he doesn’t like and often criticizes the way they live their beliefs. He sees them as hypocritical.

And one scribe, it tells us here, “seeing that he answered them well” put a question to him. Jesus seems to know what he is talking about, so he decides to test him, to ask the question that has been on his mind, the one that bothers him.   “Which commandment is first of all?” What is the most important thing in life? What is it we are supposed to believe and to do? This is the religious question we all ask, in our own ways, whether we know it or not. This is the thing we are always trying to get right. What do we do?

Coming on the Sunday before we dedicate our stewardship commitments, this has an ominous ring to it. Oh no, he is going to tell us what to do! Which way is the door? In spite of our preaching of salvation by grace, it sounds in stewardship season as if the Church has suddenly contracted a case of works-righteousness, a case of Pelagianism, which says you can be saved by doing what we tell you that you ‘ought’ to do, which includes of course making a substantial pledge to the Church.

I’m not going to do that. I’m going to stand here and suggest that you do something much more difficult.

Forget about your commitment card for the moment. Let’s talk about Jesus’ answer to the scribe. The greatest commandment? No problem: love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.   That is found in Deuteronomy 6:5, at the beginning of the ten commandments, in a passage that every Jew to this day learns by heart: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” Jesus takes the most well-known piece of the Old Testament Law and throws it back to the scribe. That is the greatest commandment, then: love God.

Let’s unpack this for a minute. Some of you may know that the ancients did not think of the heart and soul the way we do. They did not use the heart as a metaphor for the seat of the emotions. They divided up the functions of human being a little differently than we do, but the intent is the same. For simplicity, let’s assume that Jesus meant it the way we do: that hearts mean love, that soul means will, that mind means intellect, and that might means bodily strength.

We connect the heart with our emotions. How do we love God with our emotions? We will be in trouble if we try to have an emotional relationship with God the way we do with another person. That kind of love isn’t the kind we have toward God. Yet we can love God with our hearts, not romantically, but passionately. This part of our faith experience is aesthetic. When we hear beautiful music, see a beautiful scene or work of art, our hearts are filled with an emotional power. It is hard to say just what that feeling is, and each person’s may be different, but it is a powerful feeling. It connects us to something basic in our lives. It can touch the depths of our souls. that is something akin to the awe we can feel in our heart before God.

The danger here is that we confuse warm emotions with God’s presence, that we never move beyond cheap sentiment to faith, that we manipulate our emotions rather than worship God. As long as we remember this, that we cannot control God, we can enjoy the emotional power of worship, which engages us as we express our love for God, lifting up our hearts to him.

Those who have been grasped by God’s power describe is as a feeling of perfect love. John Wesley, whose ministry started the Methodist churches; Pascal the scientist, who had a powerful experience which changed his life; Simone Weil, brilliant philosopher who was overtaken with Christ’s presence; all of them described their experience of Christ as one of perfect love which overpowered them in its purity and intensity. They loved Christ back ever after.

We connect the mind with our intellect. Can we love God with our minds? What would that mean? Perhaps we can begin to consider the world, the wonder and beauty and interconnected wholeness of creation. Perhaps we can ponder the mysteries of nature and see the design of things, which doesn’t prove there is a God, but helps us see the power of God through faith. Perhaps we will study theology, and see the things of God more clearly. John Calvin defined faith as a firm and certain knowledge. The knowledge of God and God’s ways that we attain with our minds will lead us to better appreciate God’s power and majesty.

A math professor at college was a dedicated Methodist Sunday School teacher. He once asked some of us why he wasn’t allowed to work a calculus proof on a blackboard during worship as an offering to God. We all thought it a strange request. He said that singers sing their songs, and for him, higher math was at least as beautiful and elegant as good music. The proof would say intellectually the same things that music says emotionally. He wanted to show his love for God with his mind. As far as I know, he still waits.

The danger here is that we become cold intellectuals. Moderns are very analytical and rational, often doubting anything that cannot be proved in a laboratory. Too much brain work might lead us away from God. The antidote is to discipline our minds under the authority of God. We can read all kinds of things, Christian or not, consider arguments that do not honor God, as long as when we use our minds, we ask the Holy Spirit to lead us to the truth. Whatever we may discover with our minds is subject to the correction of the Holy Spirit, who leads us to know the truth, which is Jesus Christ. Whatever is true, is compatible with Christ!

The soul we connect with our will. Love God with all we do. Love God with our choices and actions. With our might, with our bodies, with our actions. Here we are close the ‘oughts and shoulds’ again. With our will comes the power to make decisions. Before we go and do anything, we make decisions: the decision to trust this God who meets us in Jesus Christ; the decision to commit ourselves to his way, and trust that his words are true; the decision to live as people who have been baptized into Christ. These are the first things we do, and they are done in response to and because of the grace of God which we feel in our hearts and know with our minds. Grace is power, and we are made able to make decisions and perform actions.

Like Ruth we may feel when grace overtakes us that we do not have a choice. Ruth went with Naomi over all the protests and good sense and calm reasoning anyone could offer. She was going because she was impelled to go. It was her decision, but she could not do otherwise. Her decision took her and forced her to go. Have you ever felt like that? Perhaps sometimes as we are given the choice to obey God, it feels like that: grace grabs us and we cannot do otherwise.

We connect might with body. With actions. With what we do. And here we run right smack dab into Jesus’ second commandment: love your neighbor as yourself. What we do to love God demonstrates itself in how we treat other people. The way to see if we love God is to see how we treat other people around us. Why should we love other people? Well, ponder the fact that God, out of all the billions of other people on the planet, has chosen, for no good reason, to love you. The more you can fathom that love, the more you see that there is no choice: if God who loves me loves these people, then I must love them too.

I told you I was going to tell you to do something much more difficult than making a commitment to the Church! Loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, or as one Junior High youth group put it, loving God with all your parts, is very hard. Even harder perhaps, because it is much more obvious and tangible, is loving these neighbors who present themselves with their messy lives and distasteful habits. Hard indeed!

Yet God makes it happen. God makes it easy, or easier. God acts to draw out of us the passions of our hearts, minds, and souls. God acts to lead us to act on behalf of neighbor, to live in the world in an alternative community, which lives by another set of values, and loves even when love is not returned or does not result in gain. And we are called to be a part of that community, and gather here around the table where Christ feeds us and nurtures us. All communities gather around tables, and so do we.

As we gather, we remind ourselves and each other of Christ’s love for us, and of our love for God and neighbor. All that we do as a church is related to this table as spokes to the hub of a wheel. We live out of the love displayed here. We live out our love in all kinds of ways, programs, ministries, and missions. We live it because if we do not, who will? We live it because it is the only choice we have, as those who have been grasped by the grace and love of God. Yes, it costs money, but that is a matter of commitment and priorities. The community is the center of our lives, as the hub of the wheel. There are those who find all that they do in daily life formed and informed by this table. The mission of the Church goes out of here with them and is expressed as love to all in the name of Christ. It is a matter of commitments and priorities. It is a matter of not letting all those other things get in the way of our being close to God. It is a matter of putting the love of God first, as the first commandment, and the love of neighbor second, as the second commandment, and all else after that. When we get that right, making our financial commitment becomes much clearer. Not easier, but clearer.

The scribe finished out Jesus’ thoughts for him with another quote, which points out that God desires love in our hearts more than burnt offerings or sacrifices. . God wants us to love God and neighbor more than God wants us to increase our commitment by x percent. God is more interested in our hearts, minds, souls, and strength, than in that card. But then, if God has our hearts, our minds, our souls, our strength, if God has our feelings, our thoughts, our decisions, and our actions, what else is left for us to spend our money on?

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Rich Man’s Mite

A Sermon by

David A. Roquemore

Camp Hill Presbyterian Church

November 8, 2009

Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17

Mark 12: 38-44

This is one of those stories in the gospel in which Jesus uses a contrast to show us the truth. He and his disciples are sitting in one of the courtyards of the temple. In that place, there were thirteen trumpet-shaped offering boxes, in which people put contributions for various things. One might be to provide oil for the temple lamps. Another might provide food for the poor. As you walked through the temple, you could put offerings in these boxes as you were able.

Jesus has just finished his arguments with the scribes and the teachers.   They have questioned him about various points of the Law, and as we read last week, demanded to know which commandment is the greatest. Jesus of course told them as we saw that the greatest is to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and a second is to love your neighbor as yourself. Then he goes and sits down with the disciples. He warns them about the behavior of the scribes, which is self-serving and pompous. Beware the scribes he says, for they want to be honored, they want to impress you with their robes and prayers, they want to live off of the offerings of poor widows. The Church should listen to this passage, ministers should listen to it, for it warns us of a certain temptation to pageantry and glory-seeking.

As Jesus and his disciples sit in the temple, they watch people coming by, putting lots of money in the treasury boxes. Many rich people contributed much, it says. They contributed large sums, because they had large sums. Then a poor widow comes along.

The poor in Palestine in Jesus’ time were desperately poor. Taxes in those days could be as high as eighty per cent of your income, between the various temple taxes, the Roman and tetrarchy taxes, tolls, and social obligations. That is for a farmer doing well; the poor lived day by day on a low wage, buying tomorrow’s food with today’s pay. The wealth in this time was controlled by a very few, who lived well at the top of the social structure. The poor lived at the bottom. There was no social welfare to speak of, though the Jews encouraged almsgiving.

This widow had the added problem of being a woman in this world, a woman who had no husband to provide for her. If she was lucky, she had some family who could take care of her to some extent. We don’t know the details of her life, but we can be sure hers was a wretched existence.

The poor widow comes by and drops two coins in the box. The coins were lepta, which were worth about one-eighth of a Roman penny. They were the smallest coins in the realm. They were essentially worthless. Just like two of our pennies today — they are money, but they don’t add much weight to the offering plate.

Jesus notices this gift, and calls the disciples to him. Look, he says, that woman gave two coins, yet her gift is much greater than all those rich peoples’ gifts. By now, the disciples are certain that Jesus is crazy. What could he mean? Those rich people put in lots of money, worth much more, able to do much more than the two cents that woman put in. These are the same disciples who protested when a woman anointed Jesus’ feet with expensive ointment that the money was being wasted. They knew what good could be done with sufficient funds. They didn’t have time to waste on a gift of only two pennies!

No doubt we can marshal the same arguments. Just ask the stewardship committee what they would rather see on your commitment card — two cents, or two thousand dollars?   We are like the disciples, like those people in the temple that morning. We think in terms of numbers and amounts. We evaluate what a gift is worthy by its size, by what it can do. Jesus does not do this.

Jesus evaluates the gifts that morning by other criteria. He doesn’t care about the size.
But Jesus uses another standard to judge these gifts.

Jesus notes that the rich are giving out of their abundance, while the woman gives all she has. The standard is not the size of the gift; the standard is the size of the part not given. The focus for Jesus is on how much you keep, not how much you give.   Jesus looks at what they have left. And in doing that he asks hard questions of us!

Jesus says, the rich gave out of their abundance. They didn’t miss it. They had that extra, so they put it in the box as they went by. Look at the counters of convenience stores and drug stores. There you see those boxes and jars for this or that charity or need, with an inch deep layer of pennies in the bottom. Someone knows you will put in those two or three pennies you get as change, because you don’t need it. It is just extra. Abundance.

My friend left seminary to become the youth pastor on a large church staff in a large city. He was one of five pastors in that church. When the senior pastor left, several others left too, and suddenly he was doing a lot of other things. Because he had a background in law and finance, he became the church administrator. He noticed that executives in the local industries were making large year-end donations for tax reasons. He suspected they were cleaning the extra cash out of their checking accounts, that these were gifts from abundance, extra money. So he wrote a carefully worded letter, suggesting they make two gifts a year instead of one, that they might be able to write a similar check in June or July as well as December. He was right, and their giving doubled. It could double mostly because they had so much that they didn’t miss this money. It was extra, just like your two pennies’ change in the drugstore.

Or take the example of Ted Turner, who started the CNN media empire. One time he was on his way to speak to some group at the United Nations, he was reading his financial reports, and learned that he was one billion dollars wealthier than he had been a year before. He decided to give that extra billion to the UN. What incredible generosity! Yet it comes from abundance, doesn’t it?  Because of the way the finances work, Turner actually did not lose that billion as he gave it away.   It came from abundance. It did a lot of good, yes, but does it really mean Turner is giving of himself? That is the point Jesus makes. The widow gives more, because she gives of her substance. She gives what she needs.

Jesus doesn’t take that rich gift so seriously, because the person giving it is not sacrificing, not really giving anything very close to him. It is just some of the abundance being given. Contrast that to the poor woman, who gave her two pitiful coins. She gave, Jesus says, her whole living. The Greek says her whole bios, her life.   She could have kept one of the coins.   It might not have done her much good, but it was her choice. She gave all she had, her whole living.

We have not given our whole living. We can’t give our whole living. We have to eat. So the issue is, are we giving out of our abundance, or more? Are we giving anything we might miss? How much do we keep? How much is left? That is the issue Jesus raises. We often think of this as the story of the widow’s mite, but actually the rich man is the one who gives the mite. He gave what he wouldn’t miss. The woman gave everything she had.

What are we doing with what is left? Are we doing ministry with the rest, with what we keep, or are we gratifying our wishes and desires? That is a hard question. We have this notion that we give some to the Church, to God, and the rest is ours to play with. But the truth is, it all belongs to God. The stewardship question doesn’t stop with the commitment cards we fill out today. That is the easy part — the hard part is, what are we going to do with what is left?

What are we doing with the rest of our lives? With the other ninety or ninety five per cent of our income? With the time we spend other places, the other 167 hours a week we have? Are we hearing God call us to ministry? Are we listening? Do you know what part God would have you play in the body of Christ? If every member of the Church has a ministry, what is yours? These are the hard questions of stewardship that Jesus asks.

What we learn from this story is that real giving involves sacrifice. The rich people gave large gifts that did a lot of good, but they were not sacrificial gifts. The poor widow didn’t give a lot, but what she gave was all she had, and was a sacrifice. It hurt. That is the kind of giving that Jesus recommends, because it demonstrates commitment. And that is the kind of gift that Jesus himself gave: his very life. Jesus’ death on the cross which saves us from sin is the sacrificial gift which is our model. We are saved by the power of Christ, and are raised with him to new life. We give our lives in joyful response to God’s grace. Giving our lives is a sacrifice, for it means that God will be in control, and not we ourselves.   The widow’s gift points to God’s gift to us in Jesus Christ, and calls us to a kind of sacrificial lifestyle.

The widow had a choice; she might have kept one coin. Perhaps it would have bought a bit of bread. Perhaps it would have bought some oil. The fact that she gave both coins shows a certain recklessness, a certain willingness to trust God for the future. And so we might ask ourselves is there some part of our lives where we are holding on to one of our coins, just in case, not quite willing to trust God? If you have some fear of trusting, I would say to you that God will provide and can be trusted.   God’s plans will not always be what you have in mind; they’ll be better! Have hope, take courage; God can be trusted fully.

Or perhaps you feel that your gift isn’t much. You might be saying, well, I can’t do much for the Church. I don’t have gifts God can use. If you say that, you are wrong. There are lots of gifts, some are large, some are not. Some are financial, and some are not. Some are obvious and “up front,” and some are hidden behind the scenes. But every gift is useful and needed Every gift is good, if given in the service of God. Think of this: the gift that Jesus held up as the model was actually worth very little in purely instrumental terms. Two coins making hardly a penny wouldn’t do much for the kingdom, but that is the gift Jesus tells us to imitate. Not in the amount — imagine if everyone gave only two cents! — but in the spirit. The spirit that says “whatever I have, Lord, whatever I can do, is yours” — that is the spirit which we need in our lives. That is the spirit which comes by the grace of God when we are made able to share all that God has given us, whatever it may be, for the glory of God in Jesus Christ. Amen.