So They Could Understand

So They Could Understand

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 24, 2016

Scripture: Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-10; Luke 4:14-21

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.

Once years ago, when I was still quite new to being a pastor, a woman told me she wanted her Bible straight, with no interpretation. When my wife Jane was serving as pastor of a congregation in Wenatchee someone asked her for a translation that would make the Bible simple. Now, I know these were good people expressing a sincere wish. I mean, sure, we’d all like the Bible to be simple; and we’d all like it if we could just pick it up, read it, and immediately understand all that it has to say to us. So perhaps you’ll forgive me if my first reaction to these requests is a bit of a professional chuckle. If you really want to know why those requests make me chuckle read Part One of my book Liberating the Bible, especially chapters (they’re called stops in the book) 2, 3, and 4. There’s a copy of it on the bookshelf downstairs, or I’d be happy to tell you how you can buy a copy of it. Here’s the shorter version of what I say there.

The Bible isn’t a simple book. It is in fact an immensely complex book. It consists of a great many different parts, the newest of which were written nearly two thousand years ago, with some of it going back three thousand years or more. It was written by and for people in cultures very different from ours, cultures that spoke languages now long dead and that had fundamental understandings of the nature of the world and of human beings very, very different from ours. We can’t really understand much of the Bible without knowing at least something about how those cultures differed from ours, about how the fundamental understandings of the biblical authors differed from ours. Moreover, it simply isn’t possible to read anything without interpreting it. We may not be aware that we’re interpreting a text when we read it, but we are. Try reading almost any text with a few other people, then ask each of them what they read. You’ll probably get as many answers as there are people who read the text. That’s just how it is with us humans. When we read we interpret. We have to. It is in our interpreting that any text comes alive and has meaning for us. Without a human reader, any text is just dead letters on a page. Every reader brings herself to the reading, and that makes all the difference. Now, I don’t mean to suggest that reading is so subjective that anything goes. It isn’t. For more about that, read my book.

And I won’t be at all surprised if what I just said surprises and even shocks some of you, so let me assure me of something: What I just said is supported by the Bible itself. We heard the Bible doing that in the two passages we just heard. Let’s start with the Luke. In that passage Jesus reads from the Bible. He reads some lines from the prophet Isaiah. For our purposes this morning it doesn’t really matter what lines. What matters is that when Jesus finishes reading he doesn’t just sit down. He doesn’t say there’s with word of God and leave it at that. Rather, he interprets the passage for his listeners. He tells them what it means for them and for him. He says “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Now, it may not be really clear to you what he meant by that, just as it isn’t really clear to me what he meant by that, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he interpreted the scripture for his audience, for the time and place in which he spoke.. He didn’t just leave the biblical text alone.

Our passage from Nehemiah is even clearer on the point than is our passage from Luke. The setting of that passage is Jerusalem after the people had returned from the Babylonian Exile. There we read that all the people of Jerusalem gathered together and that the scribe Ezra read to them what the text calls “the Book of the Law of Moses.” That probably means the entire Torah of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.” Or maybe it just means Deuteronomy, but in any event Ezra read scripture to the people. Again here, as in the Luke, the religious leaders of the people didn’t just read the text and leave it at that. Our text tells us that people called Levites, who were sort of assistant priests, “instructed the people in the Law while the people were standing there. They read from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people could understand what was being read.” There’s a clear assumption being made here, and a correct one. Left to their own devices the people would not understand the texts that were being read to them. Those texts are just too obscure. They’re too complex. They’re too subject to misinterpretation, that is, to interpreting them in a way that they just won’t support when they are more fully understood.

Some varieties of Christianity understand this need for guidance when people read the Bible better than others do. The Roman Catholic Church for example has never strongly encouraged individual Bible reading. It has always said that the people’s reading of the Bible must be guided by the priests. Now, there are some reasons why they haven’t encouraged individual Bible reading that I find disturbing, such as a desire to preserve the power of the Catholic hierarchy. But there is also some wisdom behind the Catholic Church’s reluctance to have everyone read the Bible on their own. Catholic priests, or at least most of them, have had significant training in the Bible. They know more of its history, its linguistic and cultural issues, and translation problems than do most lay people. So they can give some good guidance in how to understand the Bible. They may also lead the people into some understandings that we wouldn’t agree with, but that doesn’t change the truth of my statement. Reading with informed guidance is always better than reading with no guidance at all.

Now let me give you a few caveats here. Most people can get some good understanding when reading the Bible on their own. It’s not that no meaning arises for untrained people when they read the Bible. It does, or at least some does. And neither every person nor every book that claims to be able to assist people with reading the Bible is reliable. There are charlatans or at least badly misguided people or misinformed people out there claiming to be experts. Franklin Graham comes to mind as one of them. I suppose that’s why I wrote my guide to the Bible. I think it gives better information and better direction than most things out there. If you hear someone claiming to give instruction on the Bible whose words strike you as just plain wrong, find someone else. If you’re reading something that doesn’t make sense or that seems to you to contradict the Bible’s basic teachings of love and forgiveness, find something else. There are no guarantees. Be careful.

Now, I know that sermons are, for the most part, supposed to be about proclaiming the Good News of the Gospel, and I know that I haven’t really done that yet this morning. Bear with me. I think there really is good news in our scripture lessons this morning in which first the Levites and then Jesus interpret scripture for their people. See, the fact that scripture needs interpretation means that it doesn’t have only one, fixed, obvious meaning. Scripture has to be interpreted because people read it in a vast variety of cultures and historical-cultural circumstances. Ezra’s Levites interpreted what our text calls the Book of the law of Moses to people living in Jerusalem after many of them had returned to Jerusalem after the Babylonian Exile. They made the scripture come alive for those people in that time and place.

We have virtually nothing in common with those people other than that we’re all people and we all believe in God. We live in a different world with different understandings and different issues. Yet the Law of Moses, that is, the books of the Torah, can still come alive for people today through informed interpretation. We’re talking here about the foundational books of Judaism, and trust me, Jewish rabbis over the centuries have been immensely creative in interpreting those scriptures so that they come alive and have profound meaning for Jewish people no matter what their historical circumstances. They can come alive for us too when they’re properly interpreted, as they were in our story from Nehemiah.

Consider this: The hymn we’re about to sing, “We Limit Not the Truth of God,” has a line that it repeats after every verse. That line is “The Lord hath yet more light and truth to break forth from His holy word.” The hymn doesn’t tell you this, but that line comes from a man named John Robinson. This isn’t the old coach of the USC football team. This John Robinson was the pastor of the Pilgrims when they sailed from Holland for the new world in 1620. He was a Congregationalist, as are we. As he sent them off for a wholly uncertain future in a strange and possibly hostile place he said to them: “The Lord hath yet more truth to break forth from His holy word.” That is the great good news of the Bible. It’s never exhausted. It’s never stale.

Or at least it can be unexhausted and un-stale. The way we keep it unexhausted and un-stale is through the art and skill of interpretation. We all need voices who have the gift of reading the Bible anew for our time and place. I know some of you may react pretty strongly against that idea, but here’s the thing. The Bible itself proclaims that idea, as it does in the passages we heard where the Levites interpret the Law for the people and Jesus proclaims a new meaning to lines from Isaiah for his time and place. And the notion that new truth is always breaking forth from the Bible is bedrock Congregationalist teaching.

So this morning I ask you this: Stay open. Keep listening. Keep listening to me but more importantly keep listening for new moving of the Holy Spirit among us. The Lord hath indeed more truth to break forth from our holy scripture. Yes, that can be a bit scary and unsettling, but I assure you that it really is good news. It keeps the Bible alive. It keeps our faith alive. It keeps us alive to new challenges and new understandings that the Holy Spirit is trying to impart to us. The Lord hath more light and truth to break forth from his holy word. That’s the good news of our Bible passages this morning. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Full of Wine

Full of Wine

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 17, 2016

Scripture: John 2:1-11

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.

I’ve been working professionally with Bible stories for quite some time now. I’ve preached on them. I’ve written about them. Here’s one thing I’ve learned about the great stories in the Bible. No matter how often you read or hear them you never exhaust their meaning. The great Bible stories are like enormous onions. You peel off and take in one layer of meaning, but then you find that there’s another layer of meaning below that one, and another, and then yet another. It seems like the layers of meaning never end. That’s one thing that makes the great Bible stories great. Their layers of meaning never end.

Today we heard one of the great stories of the Bible, the Gospel of John’s story of Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding at Cana. Jesus and his mother, who for some reason the Gospel of John never names but only calls the mother of Jesus, are there. The wine runs out. Somehow Jesus’ mother knows that he can and will do something about even though at first he says the lack of wine has nothing to do with him. Mothers are like that sometimes. They know us better than we might like. We’re told that standing there were six very large water jugs, “the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing.” They’re empty. John probably intends their being empty as a slur at the Jews, but we certainly don’t need to join him in that unfortunate endeavor of his. All that matters for us is that the jugs are empty. Jesus tells the servants to fill them with water, which apparently they do. Now there’s plenty of water on hand, but that’s not what’s needed here. The wedding party needs wine. So Jesus turns the water into wine. John tells us nothing about how he did it. We aren’t told that he said anything or did anything. We’re only told that “the water…had been turned into wine.” And not just any old wine but “the best” wine. With that revelation the story ends, although John has a comment about it before he moves on.

I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed it before, but this story has all sorts of interesting details; and those details all give us different meanings in the story. John gives us one meaning in his closing comment. He says: “This, the first of his miraculous signs, Jesus performed in Cana of Galilee. He thus revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him.” John is telling us that this is a story about who Jesus really is and about how his signs, or miracles, affected his disciples. Fair enough. That’s one meaning in the story, and it is an important one. In turning the water into wine Jesus reveals the glory of God that he embodies. When his disciples see it they believe in him, or as our translation says, put their faith in him. John calls us to put our faith in Jesus too.

That’s one meaning of the story, but there are lots of others; and it is one of those others that I want to look at this morning. There are several characters in the story—Jesus, his mother, the servants, the character our translation calls “the master of the banquet.” Some translations call him the steward. I guess there’s also a bride and groom, although they’re very much in the background, make no appearance, and aren’t even named. The story also has props in it, six large stone water jugs. Let me suggest that we look at those jugs not merely as physical objects but as things that have metaphoric or symbolic meaning in the story. This morning I ask you to think of those stone jars as representing us. As representing our spirits. And I ask you to think of what happens to and in those jugs as symbolic of what can happen to us when we fill our spirits with Jesus Christ. Let me explain.

The jugs are empty, and I see the jugs as us. Folks, so many of us, so many people generally, have times when we are spiritually empty. When our souls are empty. When inside we are parched and dry. I don’t suppose stone jugs yearn to be filled, but we do. Our spirits dry out. We become empty jugs. There’s nothing in us to keep us fresh. There’s nothing in us that we can offer to other people. We yearn for more. We yearn to be filled.

And in our story Jesus fills the jugs. But notice, he doesn’t fill them with wine. Not at first. He has them filled with water. The servants, mere human beings like us, do all they can to fill the jugs. They fill them with water. Now, water is a very good and necessary thing. We all need it to live. So did the guests at this wedding at Cana. But water is also a very ordinary, worldly thing. It’s physical. It can symbolize things spiritual for us, but in itself it’s just a physical necessity.

Water wasn’t what was really needed at this wedding. Wine was. Wine with which to celebrate. Wine with which to toast the happy couple, or at least I hope they were happy. Wine to lift people’s spirits and make the occasion more festive. The master of the banquet in John’s story talks about people having too much to drink, and that’s always a problem where alcohol is concerned. But we know that wine is a good thing to have on special occasions even if we know enough and are able to control ourselves enough not to drink too much of it. The wedding banquet needed wine.

So do we. Not physical wine, although I enjoy a nice glass of wine as much as the next guy. No, what we need is spiritual wine. We need to be filled with the wine of the Holy  Spirit. We need to be filled with the wine of God’s love and God’s grace. We need to be filled with hope, hope for this life and beyond this life. We need to be filled with passion for justice. We need to be filled with peace.

These things that we need and so many more are the wine with which Jesus Christ can fill us. He can take our emptiness and turn it into the best wine. He can take the world’s bland water and make a vintage we could never find at an upscale wine boutique. Perhaps it’s a bit odd for a pastor to suggest that his people become filled with wine. OK, so it’s odd. And of course I don’t mean go get drunk. That’s never a good idea. Still, let’s be filled with the wine that Jesus offers us. The wind of the spirit. The wine of what Martin Luther King called unarmed truth and unconditional love. At Pentecost people thought the disciples were drunk. Let’s have them think we’re drunk, not literally of course but so filled with the wine of the Holy Spirit that we think and act like new, transformed, God- and Jesus-loving people. Jesus filled the empty jugs with the best wine. He turned mere water into a fine vintage. May he do that with us too. Amen.

Newness of Life

Newness of Life

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 10, 2016

Scripture: Luke 3:15-16, 21-22; Romans 6:2-4

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.

Today we commemorate the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist, and I will soon invite you to participate in a ritual renewal of baptismal vows. On this day it is particularly appropriate for us to consider baptism, what it is, what it isn’t, why we do it. Baptism is, of course, one of the foundations of the Christian faith. It is one of only two rituals that we consider to be sacraments, to be rituals that bring and reveal God’s grace. In most mainline traditions baptism is considered mostly to be the sacrament through which a person becomes a part of the Christian community. Yet as I have considered baptism this past week in preparation for today’s service I have been thinking about the way that baptism has often been seen as more than that. It has been seen to have greater, deeper significance than that; and it is some of that greater, deeper significance that I want to talk about this morning.

To do that let’s turn to Saint Paul. He taught that baptism has a much more profound meaning than merely being the sacrament through which a person becomes part of the Christian community. It meant that for him too of course, but for him baptism symbolized something far more profound. We see its meaning for Paul in the passage we heard from Romans. In that passage Paul presents baptism as nothing less than a dying to an old way of being and a rising into a new way of being. When we are baptized, he says, we are baptized into Christ’s death “in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too may live a new life.” For Paul, when we rise from the waters of baptism, we have become new people, reborn people, people who have died to the ways of the world and risen into the ways of Christ, the ways of God. For Paul, baptism is a transformation of our very nature as human beings. That certainly is a much more profound understanding of baptism that our rather tepid “it is the sacrament by which a person becomes part of the Christian community.”

Now Paul assumes a couple of things about baptism that aren’t always true for us. He assumes adult baptism not infant baptism That is, he assumes that baptism happens when a person of an age to make her own decisions decides to become Christian. He also assumes baptism by immersion, which is something we Congregationalists don’t usually do. Still, I think Paul’s understanding of baptism is worth considering. Let me suggest that try thinking of baptism as a symbolic dying to an old way of life and a rising to a new way of life.

Of course, we can’t see that happening when we baptize infants, and most of us were probably baptized as infants. So let me suggest that we see the ritual of renewal of baptismal vows that we’re about to do as that symbolic dying and rising with Christ. As we renewal the commitments of baptism, let’s think about how we can rise into new life with Christ. What would that mean? How would be have to be transformed in order to live a new life in Christ? What would we have to do? What would we have to stop doing? Would the ways we relate to the people in our lives change? Would the ways we spend our money change, or the ways we spend our time? Would how we treat God’s world change, or the ways in which we view our common life together as a church, a community, a nation?

I actually think the answers to all of those questions is yes. If we really lived a new life in Christ all of those things would change, at least to some extent. I can’t tell you how they would change in your life, and I don’t mean to suggest that we aren’t already living Christian lives in many ways. I’m sure we are. Yet there is always more. There is more we can do. There is more transformation we need to become fully faithful disciples of Jesus Christ. There’s always more because we never get all the way there. Only Jesus did that. Still, Jesus calls us always on a journey of transformation. Jesus calls us always to deeper faith and deeper commitment to the life he showed us. There’s always more to do.

So in a few minutes as we participate in the ritual of renewal of baptismal vows, let’s think about our baptisms mean in terms of us dying to an old way and rising to a new way. The specifics of what that means will be different for each of us, and that’s fine. We all live our own lives and walk on our own journeys. Yet we can all rise higher than we have. We can always respond to Christ’s call better than we have. I sure know I can, and I’m pretty sure you can too. So please take what we’re about to do seriously. If we approach it in the proper spirit it can mean a lot. May it be so. Amen.

Wisdom for All

Wisdom for All

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 3, 2016

Scripture: Matthew 2:1-12; John 1:1-18

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.

They weren’t kings, you know. Yes, we began our worship this morning with the hymn “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” but I put that hymn in our service because it’s a traditional Epiphany hymn that most people know not because they really were kings. They come to us from Matthew’s story that we just heard; and Matthew doesn’t call them kings, he calls them magi. That’s a Greek word that usually gets translated as wise men. The NIV that we just heard leaves it as magi and gives a translators note that says that the word is usually translated as wise men. So wise men it is. Just remember that no matter what the old hymn says, they weren’t kings.

Wise men it is, and I think that’s a very good thing. See, Matthew is trying to tell us something really important about Jesus in his story of the wise men. Probably the first thing that Matthew’s original audience would have noticed about the wise men is that they aren’t Jews. I doubt that anyone ever called any Jews, wise or otherwise, magi. The word just didn’t apply to them. Matthew’s wise men aren’t Jews, they’re Gentiles. They are foreigners in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, the Jewish cities in which they appear in Matthew’s story. They didn’t worship the Jewish God Yahweh. They had some other faith tradition of their own, probably Zoroastrianism, but the only thing that really matters to us is that that tradition wasn’t Jewish.

Matthew pretty clearly wants us to understand his magi as Gentile spiritual seekers. They are, I think, seeking wisdom, whatever its source. Matthew has them say that they are looking for the newborn king of the Jews, but it doesn’t make much sense for them to have been doing that if they thought that Jesus was only an earthly king. Pretty clearly they didn’t think that. Their gifts to him of frankincense means that they thought of him as someone to worship, not just someone to follow. They saw him as a spiritual figure more than a political one. For them he wasn’t so much a source of earthly power as he was a source of spiritual wisdom. Moreover, they’ve come to worship him. That means they see him not as a source of mere human wisdom but of divine wisdom, and of course they’re right about that.

Matthew is telling us through his story that Jesus is a source of divine wisdom. He’s also telling us that he’s not a source of divine wisdom only for the Jews. Matthew’s magi aren’t Jews. Matthew is telling us through his story that Jesus is a source of divine wisdom for everyone. For Jews yes, but also for everyone else. It is perhaps hard for us to remember what a big issue that was in New Testament times. It is one of the major issues behind many of the New Testament texts. It’s not an issue for us. That’s because the early Christians like Paul who said the Gospel of Jesus Christ is for everyone not just for the Jews won the argument. So we don’t worry about whether you have to be Jewish to be Christian the way Matthew and other New Testament authors did. Still, I think that Matthew’s point that Jesus is wisdom for everyone is still important for us. Jesus is, among other things, divine wisdom. He’s divine wisdom for everyone.

That’s also one of the things that the prologue to the Gospel of John that we also heard is trying to tell us. The message of John’s prologue is that Jesus is divine wisdom incarnate. Yes, I know. John doesn’t use the word wisdom. He uses the word “word.” “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” John doesn’t use the Greek word for wisdom, Sophia, when he talks about Jesus. He uses the Greek word for word, logos, instead. But John is working here wholly within one particular tradition of Judaism that spoke of a female figure called Wisdom as being a manifestation of God. The patriarchal Jewish culture eventually changed the female image wisdom into the male image word, but word was still an image of the wisdom of God. Jesus is for us Lord and Savior, but he is also God’s infinite wisdom in human form.

Which of course leads us to ask: Just what is that wisdom that Jesus is? That of course is an immense and immensely complicated question. I can only scratch the surface of an answer here, and I think Matthew’s wise men can help us make that scratch. They are seekers of wisdom. Perhaps they sought it in the stars, as many ancient people did. Perhaps they had sought it in the religious tradition of Persia, which is probably where they’re from. Wherever they had sought it earlier, they made the arduous trek across hundreds of miles of desert seeking to find it in Jesus. They found it in a tiny baby that the wicked king Herod would soon try to kill. The Gospel of Matthew is telling us in this story that Jesus is divine wisdom.

OK, but just what is that content of that wisdom? Let me suggest that we see an answer to that question in what may appear to us to be a minor detail at the end of the story. The wise men are warned in a dream not to return to Herod, so they return home by a different route. Their movement in this story tells us a lot. They move from the east to Herod, then to Jesus, then away from Herod on their way back where they came from. Herod here represents the ways of the world. He’s a very worldly king. He is the way of wealth and violence. He is the way of subservience to the great powers of the world. He is a way that seeks to dominate others for its own benefit. Jesus turns the wise men away from that supposed wisdom. They go home changed. They go home different than they were when they first came to Jesus. I invite you think of that different route they took home as a symbol how they were transformed by an encounter with Christ.

A real encounter with Christ transforms us too. If we really meet him, if we do the work of trying to understand him the way the magi’s gifts say they understood him, as the one to be followed and worshipped and as one whose death would have cosmic significance, we’ll be changed. We will be turned from the world’s ways of living and toward God’s ways of living. Away from valuing wealth and power and toward God’s values of peace, compassion, forgiveness, acceptance, inclusion, and love. We will be turned from a way of relying only on ourselves and on the world for what we need to the way to relying on God for what we really need—forgiveness, spiritual strength, hope, peace, and salvation. If we can let the story of the magi transform us, Matthew will have done his work for us. In the new year ahead let us then be open to the transforming power of God and Jesus Christ. Let us go home by a different road, the road of true wisdom for all. Amen.

Now What?

Now What?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

December 27, 2015

Scripture: Luke 2:21-24; Luke 2:25-35

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.

Christ is born! Thanks be to God! We spent a lot of time over the past few weeks getting ready. You’ve heard me preach about who it is that we’ve been waiting for. Now the waiting is over, and the one we awaited is here. We celebrated his birth last Thursday evening at our Christmas Eve service. I trust that you celebrated his birth on Friday. Jane and I did it with my children and their families on Saturday. Out in the world Christmas is over. The after-Christmas sales are under way, with merchants of all kinds hoping we’ll come and spend money we got as a gift for Christmas on their wares and services. Out in the world Christmas is over, but here in the church it’s just starting. See, on the church calendar Christmas isn’t just a day. It’s a season. It’s not a very long season. It lasts from Christmas Day until January 5, the day before Epiphany. That’s what the twelve days of Christmas are all about, seven days in December and five days in January for twelve days of Christmas. Christmas is a short season, but it is a season not a day. So for us here Christmas isn’t over and won’t be for several days yet.

Christmas isn’t over, but Jesus has gotten himself born. The one we were waiting for has arrived, and what I think is a rather important question has occurred to me as I thought about how I would preach after Christmas now that I can’t preach about waiting any more. That question is: Now what? I suspect that it is a question that occurred to Mary and Joseph too. Mary had given birth to this miraculous child, a child from God in a way no child had ever been before or has ever been since. OK, he’s born. Now what? Of course for Mary her son was a tiny newborn infant. She certainly knew that what was next in her immediate future was raising a new baby, something she’d never done before. Jesus may have been the Son of God, but he was also a little baby boy like other little baby boys. He needed care, teaching, and love just like all human babies do. Raising a baby was the immediate answer for Mary to the question now what.

Yet Luke tells us that she pondered in her heart what the things that had happened to her all meant, so surely she was thinking beyond the immediate matters of how to raise an infant, daunting enough as that can be for any of us. After all, she knew that this was no ordinary baby. She knew that he was her son but that he was also the Son of God. So surely she pondered what that meant. Who would this child become? What would he do? How would the world react to him? What would become of him? Surely these questions occurred to her, and probably many more as well. She didn’t know the answers. Jesus hadn’t lived his life yet. He hadn’t lived into being the Son of God yet. He was just a tiny newborn baby, but he was one that raised so many questions, questions to which Mary had no answer. She didn’t know his life story yet.

She didn’t, but we do. We live after Jesus, not before and with him like Mary did. Mary didn’t know what he would teach, but we do. Mary didn’t know what he would call people to do or how he would call people to be, but we do. She didn’t know how people, both ordinary people and powerful people, would react to him, but we do. She didn’t know how he would die, but we do. She didn’t know what, if anything, his death would mean, but we do. She didn’t know that he would rise from death and conquer death for everyone, but we do. On that first Christmas night Mary didn’t have the information she would need to know what it would mean not just to be Jesus’ mother but to know what it would mean to follow him. She didn’t, but we do.

Mary perhaps didn’t need excuses, but she was entitled to plenty of them for not knowing Jesus and not following him. He had after all just been born. Not so with us. We have no excuses. Yes, we have God’s grace; and I don’t believe that God condemns us when we fail to follow Jesus fully. At least, I certainly hope and pray that God doesn’t condemn us for our failings as disciples because I need God’s forbearance on that account as much as anyone else. Now, I certainly can’t give you everything that I think what we know about Jesus that Mary didn’t on that first day of her son’s birth means; but I want here to suggest what I think are at least some of the more important things that the story of Jesus that we know and Mary didn’t means for us.

Just some of the things, and while I’m no kind of poet myself, it sometimes strikes me how the poets can say important things more succinctly and more powerfully than I can. Howard Thurman is one of our great American writers and preachers. He was also a poet. Yesterday someone put some lines of his on Facebook that fit this sermon perfectly. Sometimes grace happens. Here they are:

When the song of the angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flock,

The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoner,

To rebuild the nations,

To bring peace among brothers,

To make music in the heart.

I would change his words to say “bring peace among brothers and sisters,” but otherwise these are powerful and meaningful words. They tell us that the work of Christmas begins when Christmas ends. What is the work of Christmas? Thurman suggests that it consists of several things. It consists first of all the work of making people whole. Find the lost and heal the broken, he says. Our world is so full of lost and broken people. People who despair of having a decent life. People who can’t find any meaning in their lives. People who are discovering that material success and wealth bring not wholeness but emptiness when there’s nothing more to life than them. The work of Christmas is to be there for them. To find them. To help them find the wholeness that the faith of Jesus Christ can bring and the meaning that Christians find in following Jesus. That is the work of Christmas.

Then Thurman tells us that the work of Christmas is the work of charity and social justice. To feed the hungry, to release the wrongly imprisoned. I’d add to house the homeless and bring medical care to those without it. To provide meaningful work to those who can’t find it. To challenge and remake systems that produce poverty and want. That too is the work of Christmas.

Then Thurman tells us that the work of Christmas is the work of peace. To rebuild the nations, he says. Now, that doesn’t mean send in the Marines to engage in forced nation building. Surely we know by now that that usually doesn’t bring peace but only chaos and more violence. It means that those of us in nations with means must help the people of broken nations find their own way to peace, security, and wellbeing. That is the work of Christmas. So is helping to bring peace to people in their personal lives. For us pastors and I think for all church people that means be there to listen, support, and encourage. Perhaps for churches it means being places of mediation and reconciliation. That too is the work of Christmas.

Finally Thurman says that the work of Christmas is “to make music in the heart.” To me that means to live life in the Spirit more than life in the world. To tend to our spiritual lives more than to our physical ones. To be people of faith, people who trust God and Jesus Christ to save, heal, and lead us to the spiritually abundant life that Christ was born to bring us. If we can do that, then our hearts will sing indeed. Our hearts will sing the songs of peace and good will for all people. Then our hearts will sing songs of hope and joy in the presence of God. That surely is the work of Christmas too.

Christ is born. The great gift that we anticipated has come. Now the work of Christmas begins. It is work that never ends. It is the work of a lifetime not of a moment, but here’s the good news. Jesus Christ is with us when we do that work. He is there leading us, encouraging us, prodding us. He’s there to lift our spirits when they sag. He’s there to give us a push when get lazy. He’s there to lift us up when we fall. He’s there to bless our efforts and forgive our failings. Christ is born. Thanks be to God. Now the work begins. Shall we get on with it together? May it be so. Amen.