For People Like Us

For People Like Us

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

December 20, 2015

Scripture: Luke 1:39-55

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

So Christmas is almost here. On this coming Thursday evening we will gather for our traditional Christmas Eve service to proclaim the birth of Jesus and welcome him once more into the world. We’ll read the old familiar stories. We’ll sing the old familiar carols. The choir of my former church, Monroe Congregational UCC, will join us and share their music with us. Our music group will sing too. We’ll light our candles from the Christ candle in the Advent wreath and take the light of Christ into our hearts and out into the world. It really is a special time of year. Thanks be to God!

We just heard a couple of those old familiar stories that we’ll hear again on Christmas Eve. Both of our readings this morning come from Luke’s story of Jesus’ birth. They are among the only true Advent texts in the whole Bible because they are among the very few texts that actually talk about a coming birth of Jesus Christ. They are about Mary going to visit her relative Elizabeth after he has been conceived in her by the Holy Spirit but before he is born. We hear of Mary’s meeting with Elizabeth, whom the text calls Mary’s relative. Then we hear Mary sing of the promise her as yet unborn son will bring to the world. She does that in the second reading we heard, the magnificent poem known as the Magnificat, from its first word in Latin. Many of us have sung it in Latin: “Magnificat anima mea Dominum.” The Magnificat is beautiful ancient poetry. It’s so beautiful that it’s easy to overlook how revolutionary it is, but I’ll leave that issue for another day. Today I want to focus on Mary’s praise of God and her description of herself, of her station in live. There’s a lot for us to learn and to celebrate there, so come along as we join Mary as she begins her hymn to God.

The Magnificat begins with Mary saying “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has been mindful of the humble estate of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me—holy is his name. His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation.” NIV Mary is fully aware of the awesome thing that God has asked her to do. She is to do nothing less than give birth to the Son of God. God the Holy Spirit has created God’s own Son within her, and she will bring God’s own Son into the world. That’s the great thing God has done for her. Now, that would be a truly remarkable thing for God to do with any women, but Mary is aware that it is particularly remarkable that God has done it with her. In her song she refers to her “humble estate.” Now, we actually know very little about Jesus’ mother Mary. The Christian tradition, especially the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions, have spun a lot of stories about her. They have constructed whole doctrines around her. That’s OK I guess, but we Protestants don’t go in for that sort of thing so much. We want to know what the Bible says, and the Bible says next to nothing about Mary. About all we know is that she was a woman from the tiny backwater town of Nazareth. We think her husband was a carpenter, or perhaps a stonemason. In Mary’s world that would mean he amounted to essentially nothing, for tradespeople like carpenters were the lowest of the low and poorest of the poor in that world. We know that Mary was Jesus’ mother, and there are references in the Gospels to Jesus having had brothers and sisters, presumably but not definitely from Mary. We know that Matthew and Luke say that Jesus’ conception was from the Holy Spirit, not from Mary’s husband Joseph. That’s about all there is in the Bible about Mary.

It’s not much, but it is enough to tell us at least one really important thing. It tells us that Mary was a person of utterly no significance. Only her family and friends knew she even existed. No one else had ever heard of her. She’s done nothing to bring attention to herself. She’d accomplished nothing remarkable before she became Jesus’ mother. I think she means all of those things about herself when she sings of her “humble estate.”

She wasn’t anyone special, yet she is the one God chose to become the mother of the Son of God. Some parts of the larger Christian tradition say that was because she was especially virtuous; but the Bible doesn’t say that, and I think it’s really important that it doesn’t. See, we learn from Mary—and from many other stories in the Bible—that God prefers to work primarily through people of no special repute in the world. God works through ordinary people. God even works through sinners. Not that Mary was much of a sinner, but Jacob was. He cheated his brother out of his inheritance, was married to two sisters at the same time, and had children not only by them but by their maids. David was. He raped Bathsheba and had her husband killed to cover up his crime. Moses was. He was a murderer, having killed an Egyptian who was abusing a Hebrew slave. Paul was. He approved the mob stoning St. Stephen to death before Paul’s own conversion to the faith of Jesus Christ. I guess compared to these titans of the Bible’s stories Mary was a bit of a saint, but she wasn’t anyone special. God chose someone in no way special to be the mother of God’s Son.

God chose someone in no way special to be the mother of God’s Son, and that, folks, is extraordinarily good news indeed. Jesus came into the world by a mother who was no one special. He came into the world as no one special. He grew up as no one special, an insignificant boy in an insignificant town, probably learning to follow in Joseph’s footsteps as a carpenter or stonemason. And all of those truths about both Jesus and Mary tell us something really important about both Jesus and the God he represents on earth. See, Mary and Jesus were people like us. Or at least Mary was, and Jesus was until he began his extraordinary ministry of teaching and healing and living into his identity as the Son of God. They were people like us. Good enough people. Decent, caring people, but not people of any extraordinary importance. Not people the world knew anything about, at least at first. Not famous people. Not powerful people. Not rich people. In other words, about as much like us as a person from that very different world could be.

They were people like us, and God came through them precisely to people like us. God didn’t have to come into the world as a nobody, but could we really relate to a Christ who was rich and powerful? I don’t think I could. I don’t know what it’s like to be rich and powerful. I’ve never been much of either. But I have been, and am, a person a bit like Jesus and Mary. A person of no particular repute. A decent enough person, but not a special one in any significant way. Jesus came as a person like us for people like us. O yes, Jesus may be for the rich and famous too; but mostly Jesus is for people like us. People the world doesn’t think much of but people God loves more than we can ever imagine. People God loves infinitely, and our finite minds can’t ever grasp fully what that means. We can understand that God came precisely to people like us. Ordinary people doing the best we can. Ordinary people deeply needing God’s forgiveness. Ordinary people deeply needing God’s grace. Ordinary people needing to know that even if the world doesn’t think much of us we aren’t insignificant in the bigger picture of things. Ordinary people who need to feel God’s love and God’s care. That’s what we’ll celebrate this week at Christmas. God coming through a woman like as a man like us for people like us.

That my friends is the great good news of Christmas. The Son of God born as a traveler with no place to stay come not to people of worldly importance but to people like us. Come to show us that to God we matter. To God we matter a lot. To God we matter enough to be born for and even enough to die for. Come to show us that God loves all of God’s people, not just the ones the world thinks matter. That’s what Christmas is all about. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Advent series part 2

Who Are We Waiting For? Part 2 Jesus as Divine: What Are We to Make of the Incarnation?

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 6, 2015

Scripture:
Matthew 1:18-24 John 1:1-5, 14

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

In my sermon last week I insisted at considerable length that before Jesus was anything else he was a real human being. That is true, and it is important; but for the Christian tradition it is not a complete answer to the question of who Jesus is for us. It is not a complete answer to the question “Who are we waiting for?” Jesus was a human being, yes; but the Christian tradition has said almost from the very beginning that, while not ceasing to be a human being, Jesus was also much more than a mere human being. Almost from the very beginning the Christian tradition has said that Jesus of Nazareth was God Incarnate, God become human. What are we to make of that contention? Does it have any meaning for us? If so, what is that meaning? To those questions we now turn in this second part of our Advent sermon series.

Although some Christians today see Jesus as merely a man (trust me, I see them all the time in my work on the UCC’s regional Conference Committee on Ministry), I remain convinced that the classic Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is indispensable to true Christianity. Although its classic theological formulation didn’t come until the fourth century CE, the doctrine of the Incarnation has its roots in the New Testament, where it is stated in various ways. However it is stated, the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation holds that Jesus was, at the same time, both fully human and fully divine.

How in heaven’s name are we to understand that contention, that someone who was human like us was also God Incarnate? To get at how we are to understand the Incarnation we have to start, I think, with understanding the experience that the first Christians had of Jesus. Clearly both during his lifetime when he was physically present with them and after his death and ascension to heaven when he was spiritually present with them, the earliest Christians experienced the presence of God in Jesus in some unique way. In him they saw a revelation of the nature and will of God unlike anything they had experienced before. They felt the very presence of God in him in a way they had never felt before. They somehow knew that he communicated truth about God in a unique way, and they felt that he not only taught that truth, he somehow was that truth.

This experience came first, then the earliest Christians struggled to find language with which to express that experience of the presence of God in Jesus. We see them doing that in our Gospel readings this morning. Matthew turned to the prophet Isaiah and found the term Emmanuel, God with us. The author of the Gospel of John turned to the wisdom tradition of Israel and found the Word, John’s term for a concept that in earlier Jewish literature was called Wisdom. Later, the bishops gathered at the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 CE would use more philosophical language, the language you may know from the Nicene Creed, primarily that he was “of one substance” with God the Father. Whatever language Jesus’ followers found to express their experience of the human being Jesus being somehow also God, their language for him was always grounded in an experience of him that precedes the language. The language is symbolic, that is, it points beyond itself to a truth that can never really be captured in human language. That truth is found first of all not in language but in an experience, the experience of Jesus’ followers then and now that in him and precisely in his humanity we meet God in a unique way. As is the case with all human truth, experience comes first. The experience of Jesus as manifesting the presence of God comes first. Then we try to find language to express that experience.

That really is what the Incarnation, what the understanding of Jesus as divine, is all about. We aren’t to understand it literally. We aren’t to think literally that somehow there was a human Jesus and a divine Jesus both living in the same body. Rather, we are to understand that in the human being Jesus we see and come to know God. My favorite way of putting it is to say “if you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.” Jesus is divine because in him we see God, we see what God is like.

And just as Jesus being truly human really matters, so does Jesus being truly divine also matter. To understand how it matters, think of Jesus as being all about relationship. As a human being he shows us how we are to relate to God. We see the human Jesus relating to God in faithfulness to God’s calling to him, in faithfulness in proclaiming and living out the Kingdom of God, in a life of prayer, and in a life of compassion for all of God’s people. As human Jesus shows us how we are to relate to God.

As divine Jesus shows us how God relates to us. A mere human being can reveal to us a lot about being human, but a mere human being can’t really reveal anything to us about God. It is in his divine nature that Jesus shows us who God is. Because we confess him as God Incarnate we see in him not only ideal humanity. We see also as much of the nature and will of God as we humans are capable of comprehending. We see how God relates to us humans and to all of creation. It is because we confess that Jesus is God Incarnate that we can understand his teaching as coming not just from another human being but from God. It is because we confess that Jesus is God Incarnate that we come through him to know God as compassionate, nonviolent, passionate about justice, and always forgiving of our human failings. It is because we confess that Jesus is God Incarnate that we see the way in which he turned the wisdom of the world on its head not just as the teaching of a fellow human being but as the teaching of God.

And here’s the main thing for me: Because we confess Jesus as God Incarnate we see in him how God relates to human life and more importantly to human suffering and to human death. Because we confess Jesus as God Incarnate we see in his death not merely the death of a martyr, although surely it was that. We see how God relates to us when we suffer and when we die. We see God not preventing human suffering and death but entering into them, sanctifying them, and being always present with us in them. We see all of that in Jesus on the cross, and we couldn’t see any of it without our confession that Jesus is God Incarnate. When we reduce Jesus to a mere human being his death loses all of its meaning for us; and for me, that is a loss of immense magnitude that takes much of the meaning out of Christianity. We lose our hope in the face of our mortality. We lose the comfort that God’s presence can bring when we suffer and when we die, as we all surely do. In times of grief and pain I have looked to Jesus on the cross and known that God feels my grief and my pain and is present with me in them. That knowledge has brought me great comfort. But that knowledge has brought me that comfort because when I see Jesus on the cross I see so much more than a fellow human being. I see God in human form entering into human suffering and death and demonstrating in fullest measure God’s solidarity with us in those unavoidable human conditions.

The Incarnation, the notion that Jesus is not just fully human but is also fully divine, is the best news that our Christian faith has to give us. I said in my sermon last week that God is an abstraction, and I think our word God is that indeed. Jesus is not an abstraction. He is a man, and we individual humans aren’t abstractions. In Jesus as God Incarnate we see God in a way we can understand. A way we can strive to emulate. In Jesus as God Incarnate we see that God doesn’t despise our human condition, our human failings. Rather we see God taking them into God’s own person, sanctifying them, and showing us in the clearest possible way that God accepts and loves us no matter what. So let us celebrate Jesus not just as a great man but as God become a man. That’s why Christmas is so much more than the remembrance of the birth of a man. It is the celebration of nothing less than the birth of God. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Advent Sermon Series, Part 1

Who Are We Waiting For, Part 1

Jesus as a Human Being

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 29, 2015

Scripture: Mark 8:27-30

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It’s Advent. We talked about what that means during our 9 o’clock session this morning. If you weren’t there but want to know more about Advent I’ve got a handout I prepared on the subject. Let me know, and I’ll get you one. To recap very briefly, Advent is the season of the church calendar when we intentionally anticipate, wait for, and prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ as Christmas. We’re preparing to celebrate the birth of Jesus, but I have an important question about why we’re doing that. That question is: Just who is it whose birth we are preparing to celebrate? That may sound like a dumb question, but it isn’t. Just who Jesus is is perhaps the central question of the Christian faith. In our reading from Mark this morning Jesus asked his disciples who they say he is. He asks us that question too. It’s a really important question, and it is the question I want to focus on in a sermon series this Advent. So here goes.

The question of who Jesus is arises in the context of a Christian tradition that has seen Jesus as God Incarnate and as Savior more than it has seen him as a human being. Yet whatever else he may have been Jesus was a human being, and it is with his humanity that we must begin our effort to understand who he is for us. So today you get part one of this sermon series, Jesus as human.

As we await the birth of Jesus more than anything else we await the birth of a human child. A human baby. A baby boy not different from all the baby boys we have known in our lives. A squalling, pooping, nursing, spitting up baby boy. “Away In a Manger” may say “but little Lord Jesus no crying he makes,” but come on. We’re talking about a human baby here. A human infant at risk for SIDS, likely to get chicken pox, measles, the flu, or worse. A human being who would die one day like the rest of us. A baby born to a poor, unwed, teenage mother. A poor boy of no worldly status, with no real prospects for getting ahead in life. With a human father at the bottom of the social ladder. A real nobody in the eyes of the world, all those stories about his birth to the contrary notwithstanding. They were all written much later by people for whom he had gone from being nothing to being everything. But at first, at his birth, he was just another baby boy of no account in the world. It is certain that when he was born nobody but his parents even noticed.

And I need to ask you: Does it shock you, even just a little bit, to hear me talk about Jesus like that? I confess that it shocked me a little bit when I composed those lines about Jesus as an ordinary baby boy, as true as I think that they are. I think there’s a good reason for that shock. The Christian church has for so long proclaimed Jesus as God Incarnate, as God walking around on earth looking like a human being, that it’s really easy to think of him as God and forget that he was a human being; but before he was anything else, he was a male human being, first a baby boy, then a child, a youth, and finally a young man. Before he was anything else Jesus was a man, a human being like any other human being in his bodily make up. Before he was anything else, he was one of us.

He was one of us, and that really matters. It really matters because his call to us is to follow him. His call to us is to be like him, and if he were only God there’s no way we could be like him. I’m not at all sure I can really be like him even with him being truly a human being, but I know that I couldn’t be like him at all if he were only God. None of us humans could. We aren’t God, or even gods. In other mythologies of other cultures gods sometimes appear as humans, but they never truly are humans. Jesus is truly human, and that really matters. We can’t follow someone who only appears to be human but is really a god because we don’t just appear to be humans and not gods, we are humans and not gods. The great virtue of Christianity is that it says that in Jesus God didn’t just show up on earth appearing to be human. God actually became human in the person of Jesus. In Jesus we can see a model of what it truly means to be human only if Jesus truly is human. He was truly human, and that is why we not only should try to follow him, we actually can follow him.

Jesus calls us human beings to be like him, and because he is truly human we can be like him; but of course in order to do that we have to know who he was as a human being. What sort of human being was he? What does it mean for us to follow him? There is a term for Jesus that I’ve heard Jesus called that I think sums up pretty well who he was as a human being. Jesus is a Galilean sage. Sage here doesn’t mean an herb you use in turkey dressing. It means a wise person. As a human being, quite apart from whether or not he was anything more than a human being (more about that next week), Jesus was a wisdom person. He taught wisdom and he embodied wisdom. He taught and he embodied the wisdom of God. Of God yes, but he did it as human being; and that means we can do it too.

OK. Jesus was a sage, a wisdom person; but just what was the wisdom that he taught? There’s no way to give a complete answer to that question in a short sermon, or even in a long book. So let me suggest something that characterized his teaching generally rather than spend too much time on specific teachings, important as those are. We all know something about worldly wisdom. We know how the world works. We know what the world values. The world values power. The world values wealth. The world values success, prestige, and status. The world looks up to those who succeed in acquiring those things, and the world doesn’t much care how they got them or who got used and exploited along the way. The world is organized into nations, and the nations of the world routinely use violence against each other and against their own citizens. They use violence to gain territory, access to natural resources, or other things they think they need; and they don’t much care who dies in their efforts to get them. They use violence against their own citizens. They execute people they believe are criminals. They unleash the riot police and even the military on crowds that are making demands that those in power in the nation don’t like. All of those things are the ways of the world—the ways of Jesus’ world and the ways of our world.

If you want to know what Jesus taught about any particular subject, look first at what the world says about that subject. You’ll be pretty safe in assuming that Jesus taught the opposite. He taught nonviolence. About that there is no doubt whatsoever. He taught justice, and by justice he meant what the great prophets of the Jewish tradition meant by it—care for the poor, the needy, the marginalized, the vulnerable. He meant inclusion of the outcast. He valued the ones the world dismisses and ignores. He made the last first and said see me in “the least of these.” Jesus taught compassion not condemnation, love not hate, care not purity. In everything he said and did he turned the world’s wisdom on its head and taught the wisdom of God in its place.

And it is so easy to dismiss all of that teaching as some sort of otherworldly ideal that is so impractical as to become impossible in the world. Maybe it’s the wisdom of God, but we aren’t God. Maybe it gets lived out in some sort of heaven on some other plane of existence; but we live in this world, and in this world Jesus’ vision just doesn’t work. It is so easy to come to that conclusion, and that is why Jesus being first of all a real human being is so important. It is so important because the reality of Jesus’ humanity means that living in the wisdom that he taught and that he lived is a human possibility not merely a divine one. His thoughts are not beyond us, for they are the thoughts of a human being. His way of life is not beyond us, for it is the way of a human life. Jesus being truly human and not merely appearing to be human really does matter.

It really does matter, and it’s really good news too. It’s really good news precisely because, like I’ve already said, as a human being we can relate to Jesus. We can be close to Jesus. Jesus can come to us as one we can understand and as one who can understand us. Yes, we love God. Of course we do. But let’s face it. God is an abstraction. God is spirit yes, buy spirit isn’t flesh and blood like we are. Jesus is flesh and blood like we are. So hold onto Jesus. Invite Jesus into your heart like you invite a friend into your home. Because he’s human you can do that. Because he’s human you can love him intimately, and he can love you intimately. Who are we waiting for? The human being Jesus. That’s not all he is, but it is a big part of who he is. He’s coming to us as one of us. Thanks be to God! Amen.