Sunday, January 29, 2017

Micah 6:8


Micah 6:8

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 29, 2017



Scripture: Micah 6:1-8



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.



Years ago my mother gave me a sweatshirt. Here it is. Can you read it? It says “Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your dog.” As some of you know, my wife Jane and I have a Pembroke Welsh Corgi. I don’t think it’s possible to walk with a Pembroke Welsh Corgi any way other than humbly. I mean, people are much more attracted to our Corgi than they are to either Jane or me. Lots of people in our neighborhood know the Corgi’s name—Ringo—and know neither Jane’s name nor mine. Walking with a dog as cute and appealing as a Pembroke Welsh Corgi is truly a humbling experience. I think he’s smarter than we are too. Walking with a corgi is a good spiritual exercise. It is an exercise in walking humbly, albeit with a dog not with God.

I imagine you all know those famous lines from the prophet Micah. The NIV we use here translates those lines as “He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” But different translations of the Bible render it in slightly different ways. Here’s my favorite one: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” NRSV It’s closer to what’s on my sweatshirt, and I prefer the word kindness to the word mercy. So I’ll use kindness here instead of mercy. Don’t worry about it. If you prefer mercy that’s fine. That’s the word the NIV uses.

As I contemplated that famous verse this last week thinking about what to preach this morning one thing jumped out at me. Micah’s admonition sounds so simple, but over the centuries people of faith have been so good at making the life of faith so much more complicated than that. I think Micah was reacting against people in his day who were making their faith a lot more complicated than that. His day is some 2,700 years ago, and Micah tells us that people then were making the faith be about something far different from Micah’s beautiful instruction. They were making it be all about a complex system of sacrifices. Burnt offerings. Calves precisely one year old. In a bit of hyperbole thousands of rams or ten thousand rivers of oil. Referring to what may have been a very ancient practice of the Hebrews but hadn’t been for a long time by the time Micah came along maybe even a person’s firstborn child. The ancient Jewish laws around these sacrifices could get really complicated. You had to know just what to sacrifice for any particular purpose. You had to do the sacrifice at the right time and in the right way. Beyond that, all those sacrifices weren’t really about how you live your life. Some of them were about obtaining forgiveness of sin, but the laws of sacrifice didn’t tell anyone about how God wants us to live. So Micah says it’s not at all about sacrifice. Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God.

People in Jesus’ time we making the life of faith perhaps even more complicated than they were in Micah’s time. The Jewish leaders of his day, both the Sadducees and the Pharisees, made the faith be all about obeying the laws of Moses. Those are the laws found in the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament. They said obey them. Obey all of them. Do you know how many of those laws there are? 613. That’s the traditional number for laws of Moses. I have trouble remembering all of the Ten Commandments. I wouldn’t have a chance of remembering all 613 Torah laws. Like Micah, Jesus said you don’t have to. He said “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all you mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” It’s not that doing that is always easy, but it’s sure a lot easier than remembering all 613 laws of Moses and obeying them.

People in our time make the life of faith a lot more complicated than Micah did too. We have a lot of latter day Pharisees among us. They make the Christian faith be all about rules. Don’t you dare break the rules, they say. They do that in particular around rules of sexual behavior, but many of them have a lot of other rules too. They’re mostly “don’ts.” Don’t drink alcohol. Don’t dance. Don’t play cards. Don’t work on Sunday. Don’t miss church on Sunday, even if the Seahawks are playing an early game in the eastern time zone. Don’t get divorced, no matter what. For some extreme modern Pharisees it’s women don’t speak in church and don’t presume to teach men and for heaven’s sake don’t let the thought of being a preacher or a pastor cross your mind. Don’t, don’t, don’t. Rules, rules, rules. That’s what the Christian faith is for an awful lot of our fellow Christians today.

Micah knew better. Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God. Three little admonitions that are more like encouragements than like rules or laws. Still, there are always questions about any saying actually means in practice. I think it helps us know just what those admonitions mean for us if we look just briefly at their meaning. Do justice. Biblical justice, the justice Micah had in mind, isn’t about due process, like justice so often is among us today. It is about caring for people in need. The ancient Hebrew prophets often specified three categories of people toward whom God calls us to do justice. They were the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, that is, the non-Hebrew living among Hebrew people. I think that last one, justice for the alien, speaks to us particularly powerfully today when the dignity and rights of foreign immigrants and refugees are under strong attack by President Trump and his supporters. The thing to know about all three of those categories is that they were the most vulnerable people in Hebrew society. Micah’s “Do justice” comes down to taking care of the most vulnerable people among us, no matter who they are or where they come from.

Love kindness. A lot of Christians seem to think that the Christian life basically comes down to being nice. Actually, the Christian life is about a whole lot more than that, but Micah’s call to us to love kindness is important. Even though they think being Christian means being nice, Christians can be awfully mean. There’s no fight like a church fight. I’m not sure why, but that sure seems to be true. So Micah reminds us to be kind toward one another. That doesn’t mean we all have to agree about everything. We don’t. It does mean that we are to respect each other even, or especially, when we disagree. To be gentle with one another. To take care in our relationships that we not cause unnecessary harm. Love kindness. A really good reminder.

Walk humbly with your God. This one may be a bit more obscure than the other two, or at least it is for me. I mean, don’t we always walk humbly with God? How can we be anything but humble toward God? Well, somehow we often find ways. So often we people of God get very arrogant toward God. We do that when insist that we know the one absolute truth about God and other people who know something different than we do are just plain wrong. Sometimes we go way beyond saying they’re wrong and say they’re damned for all eternity because they know God differently than we do. That attitude is pure human arrogance. It claims what we cannot claim, that we know definitively and eternally who God is, what God is like, what God does, and what God wants from us. Yes, we have our ideas, our confessions about those things; and they are important. But when we claim absolute certainty about them we forget a couple of really important things. We forget that God is infinitely beyond us. God is so beyond us that we can never fully know who God is or what God wants. Yes, we act on our understandings of those things, but God is so much bigger than we are that we must always remain humble about them. We must always leave room for the possibility that we may have gotten something wrong. We may have misunderstood. Somebody else may have understood something important about God that we have missed.

When we claim to know absolute truth about God we also forget that God is God and we are not. We people of faith set ourselves up as gods all the time. We want to take responsibility for our lives, forgetting that God is charge and we aren’t. We want to take responsibility for fixing the world, forgetting that it is God’s world not ours. Forgetting that God calls us to work with and for God, not to be God. That’s not walking humbly with God. That’s being arrogant toward God.

So let’s thank God for Micah’s instruction here. Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God. When we understand what those things really mean they become a sacred guide for the life of faith. They remind us that the life of faith isn’t about a whole bunch of complicated laws and rules. It is about living a life that is faithful in the sight of God. It is about always remembering the basics, the foundational things of the life of faith. Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with your God. May God help us to do it. Amen.

Sunday, January 22, 2017

Immediately?


Immediately?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 22, 2017



Scripture:



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 Matthew told us a story this morning. In that story several men are plying their trade as fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. As far as we know, they’ve never even heard of Jesus, much less met him or gotten to know him. He comes walking along the shoreline where they are working. He calls to them, and they immediately they drop what they’re doing and go off following him. Two of them leave their poor old father Zebedee to do the family work without them. That’s the story Matthew tells.

Let me tell you another story. There was a man. Many people thought him wise, for he had many letters after his name—MA, PhD, and JD. He was a lawyer. He went about his work practicing law. He analyzed his clients’ cases. He did his legal research. He drafted his pleadings. He wrote his briefs. He tried his cases. He won a few, and he lost some too. He wasn’t a great lawyer, but he was a good enough one.

Then, over the course of a couple of years, things started to go wrong for him. He was finding it hard to keep practicing law. He became depressed. He knew something was missing. He knew there was something else he was supposed to be doing, but he didn’t know what it was. He had one idea about what he wanted to do, but that idea was so wildly impracticable that he knew he’d never do it—and he never did. Something deep inside him told him he was a preacher, but he didn’t pay that much mind. It made absolutely no sense. It had never consciously occurred to him to be a preacher. He had been a Christian of sorts most of his life, but for reasons he can’t tell you to this day he started to study Christian theology, the best theology there was at the time, Paul Tillich, John Dominic Crossan, and most of all Douglas John Hall.

Then something incredible happened. A university in his town created a ministry program for Protestant students even though it was, and is, a Catholic university. He knew he had to enroll. He didn’t really know why. He didn’t know what he would do with a ministry degree, for it had never really occurred to him that the thing he was supposed to be doing was parish ministry. He sure didn’t know how he was going to pay for it. Something just told him he had to do it. So he closed his law office, took a part time job in a legal services office providing free representation to low income tenants in eviction cases, and went to seminary. He went into debt to pay for it. While he was there he did intern work at a local church, and that’s when the light really came on. He said to Jesus “Really? This is what I’m supposed to be doing?” And Jesus answered “Yes, my son. This is what you’re supposed to be doing.” So he followed Jesus, and he has been doing parish ministry most of the time ever since. After he got his first call and not long before she died of breast cancer his wife of thirty years said to him: “I’m so glad you finally are who you really are.”

Those are two stories of God and Jesus Christ calling people to follow them, to be Christians not just in thought but in deed, in what they did with their lives. The first story is the story from the Gospel of Matthew of Jesus’ call to Peter, Andrew, James, and John to become Jesus’ first disciples. In that story everything happens really fast. The men Jesus calls immediately drop everything and follow him. The second story is, in rough outline at least, my story. When I compare my story to the story the Gospel of Matthew tells of Jesus’ calling of the first disciples, it causes me to wonder. Did Peter, Andrew, James, and John really just walk off all at once and leave their lives behind when some stranger they didn’t know walked by and said follow me? That’s sure not how it happened with me. It’s not how it happened with a lot of Christian pastors I know. When I went to my first orientation session at Seattle University, the university that created that ministry program for Protestant students in its Catholic School of Theology and Ministry, it became a joke among us beginning students that God called, and we hung up. We’d all resisted. We’d all had enormous doubts. We all said earlier in our lives “Sorry, God, you’ve got the wrong person.” We were like the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah. Isaiah said I’m not worthy. Jeremiah said I’m only a boy. God didn’t care. God called them to be prophets anyway, and they went and did God’s bidding. So did those first four of Jesus’ disciples really do it immediately, just like that, apparently with so little thought? Maybe they did, but most of us don’t respond to Christ’s call with such alacrity. We hesitate. We hem and haw. We deny. We try to get out of it. And Jesus will have none of it. If he’s going to call you he keeps after you until you give in and say alright already. I’ll go. Maybe it happens all at once like it did in Matthew’s story. Maybe it happens over the course of several years, like it did with me. However it happens, it happens.

Now, Jesus Christ calling people to change their lives isn’t always something that people welcome. It can be disruptive. It can change just about everything in your life. I’ve never made nearly as much money in ministry as I did in law. I had to learn how to live with less. Less material wealth, that is. But with that less material wealth came great spiritual wealth. More spiritual wealth than I had ever possessed before. With a drop of income came a miraculous increase in satisfaction with my life and my work. Peace that I had never felt before too, not that it’s always there, but mostly it is. The joy of knowing that my work has meant something really important to at least a few people. The fulfillment that comes from knowing, like my late wife said, that I am who I really am. Yes, I miss the boat I could afford when I was a lawyer, but other than that my decision to follow Christ’s call to me into professional ministry has been nothing but a blessing in my life.

Now, here’s the thing. Sometimes Christ’s call to us leads us into enormous, obvious changes in our lives. But sometimes that call is less dramatic. Sometimes it is less disruptive. It all depends on what we need. Peter, Andrew, James, and John needed to follow Jesus as intimate disciples. I needed to stop being a lawyer, something that inside I never really was in the first place, and become who I really am. And I know that God and Jesus Christ call each and every one of us in some way. Maybe they call you to go to school and change your profession when you’re way too old to do it and can’t afford it, like they did with me. But maybe their call to you is very different from that. Maybe their call to you is softer, quieter, gentler. Maybe it’s a call out of a life of fear. Maybe it’s a call to stop hiding your gifts and to share them with others. Maybe it’s a call to care for a sick neighbor. Maybe it’s a call to volunteer at the food bank. Maybe it’s a call to have peace and courage as you face the end of your earthly life.

Christ’s calls to people are as varied as the people whom Christ calls, but there’s one thing those calls all have in common besides their origin in God. See, God is with God’s people in each and every one of those calls. God is there to lift us up, to give us a nudge when we need it, to point the way, to forgive our mistakes, and to feed our spirits with God’s Holy Spirit every step of the way. That doesn’t mean accepting God’s call will be easy. It doesn’t mean we’ll always understand the call fully or know what to do with it. But see, in all of that God is there with us, continuing to call, continuing to prod, continuing to lead, until at last God leads us home. Home in this life. Home to who we really are. And home in the next life, to our eternal home with God.

So let me ask you: Have you heard God calling? Is there something in your life you need to be called out of? Is there something you dream of that you need to be called to? Whatever your circumstances, God is calling. God is calling you. Each and every one of you. Not all in the same way. Not all to the same thing. But God is calling, and God is promising. Promising you whatever you need to answer God’s call. Maybe God is calling you to do something immediate. Maybe God is calling you to get up and move now, right away, without delay, like Jesus called those first disciples. But maybe not. God’s call takes many forms. Sometimes it can take years for us fully to hear it and respond to it, and that’s OK. It’s OK because sometimes it’s how God works. However God is working in your life, God is calling.

So let’s listen, shall we? God is calling each one of you individually, and God is calling us collectively as a church. Where is God calling us to go? What is God calling us to do? Ah, those questions are much harder to answer than the question of whether God is calling. To answer them we need to listen. Most of all we need to pray. We need to be open to the myriad ways God calls and answers our needs. God answered my need in part by leading me to the perfect law job while I was in seminary, law that felt worth doing when most law no longer did. Then God led me to rewarding ministry, first in Monroe, then here. I don’t know how God will answer your need when you answer God’s call, but I know that God will. So let’s stay awake. Let’s be alert. Let’s pray. Let’s pray by listening. God is calling. Let’s not hang up, OK? Amen.

Sunday, January 15, 2017

Called to Act


Called to Act

A Martin Luther King Day Meditation

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 15, 2017



Scripture: Isaiah 49:1-7; Psalm 40:1-11



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.



Let me ask you a question: Why is it so hard for people of faith to speak up? I mean, we have trust in what we understand to be the most profound truth there is or ever was, the truth of God. Yet in my experience and in the experience of so many others we people of faith mostly keep quiet. Oh sure, some aggressive evangelicalistic types talk loudly and incessantly about how everyone has to believe like they do and think like they do to avoid spending eternity in hell; but that’s not the kind of speaking up I mean. I mean speaking up about the things that God really cares about. Things like social and economic justice. The things the eighth century prophets lifted up and proclaimed to the people of their time. The things Jesus mostly spoke about, about caring for people in need, about loving God and our neighbor as ourselves, with absolutely everyone, especially the ones we think we hate and the ones we condemn, being our neighbor. We know what God wants in all those areas of human life, and we know that God wants us to speak up about them; but mostly we don’t do it. Especially in less conservative, less evangelical churches we don’t do it. And I wonder why not? We say it’s because we believe in individual freedom of conscience, and everyone has a right to her or his own opinions. We say because the Gospel isn’t political, never mind that it really is. I think mostly because we’re timid. We’re uncomfortable with public speaking of any kind and really uncomfortable with public proclamation of prophetic truths. Whatever the reason, we mostly clam up and don’t publicly address public issues about which our faith really has a great deal to say.

It has always been that way with people of faith. We see ancient Hebrew writers wrestling with it in our scripture readings this morning. The prophet who speaks to us across the millennia in our passage from Isaiah knows that God has formed him to be God’s servant in the world, formed him like a sharpened sword and a polished arrow. He knows that God wants him to proclaim God’s truth to the world, as he puts it do it as one in whom God will display God’s splendor. But he doesn’t want to do it. He says “I have labored to no purpose; I have spent my strength in vain.” He doesn’t want to do it because he thinks nothing will come of it. But God isn’t about to let him off easy like that. God says that this prophet will go not only to Israel but to all people to proclaim the faithfulness of the Lord God. True prophets are always reluctant prophets, and this prophet just wants to keep quiet. God says: Nope. That’s not what I created you to do.

Then we have Psalmist of Psalm 40. He too knows that God doesn’t want him to keep quiet. He says God has put a new song in his mouth to praise God. He says he wants to do God’s will because God’s law is within his heart. So he says: “I did not hide your righteousness in my heart; I speak of your faithfulness and salvation. I do not conceal your love and your truth from the great assembly.” He has God’s truth. He has God’s law, and he doesn’t keep quiet about it.

Folks, God doesn’t want us to keep quiet about God’s truth today either. In fact, I am convinced that today as much as ever, or maybe more so, God calls us to speak. Indeed, God calls us to do more than that. God calls us to act. God is always calling God’s people to speak and to act. Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day. Dr. King was one who heard God’s call to speak and to act. He heard God’s cry against the brutal injustice of racial segregation and racial discrimination. He spoke against those evils with the words of prophets, with Jesus’ words, with the great words of the Jewish and Christian traditions about justice and peace. He spoke against hatred and discrimination with an eloquence few have ever matched. We all know some of his words:

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood….

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!...



And all the people say Amen! Magnificent words. Powerful words. Words of God’s truth for all people in all times and places. King spoke them far better than I can, but we are all called to speak them. God does not call us to be silent. God calls us to speak.

But Martin Luther King knew that God calls us to do more than speak. He knew that God calls us to act. In April 1963, King and many others were arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, for violating a state court injunction that prohibited demonstrations in that most segregated of all American cities. While he was in jail he read a letter from eight clergymen, mostly Christian but also one Jewish rabbi, calling on him and his people to stop acting. To stop demonstrating. To carry on their struggle for justice only in the thoroughly racist courts of 1960s Alabama. King replied with a long essay that we know as A Letter From a Birmingham Jail. It’s not in the form of a speech, but it is one of the most powerful prophetic statements of God’s call to us to act for justice in all of American history. People told King just use the courts. They told him give it time, you’re moving too fast. They told him don’t do things that provoke the authorities to acts of violence against you. They said quiet down. Wait. Don’t be so pushy. Don’t be so public. And Dr. King replied to all that with the wisdom of the ages, the wisdom of God. He quoted Amos: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” He said we are not violent, but the guardians of racism and segregation are. So be it. It is always the right time to act for the good, the right, the just. It is always the right time to act to end the suffering caused by injustice. It is never the right time to sit idly by while wrong rules the earth and oppresses God’s people. For King’s courage in speaking and even more for King’s courage in acting I say Thank you God. Thank you for your prophets of justice. Thank you for your prophets of nonviolent resistance to evil. Thank you for your nonviolent prophets of peace.

Dr. King was murdered almost fifty years ago. He spoke to the people of his time and place. He spoke of the ills of his time and place. But folks, it’s not all that different today. Yes, our country has made significant progress in race relations. We will soon mark the end of the presidency of our country’s first Black President, and that is significant. But as President Obama said last week American racism is far from a thing of the past. Institutional racism puts enormous numbers of young Black men in prison, numbers grossly disproportionate to their percentage of our population. Popular racism elects public officials who are themselves racist. The Senate will soon confirm as Attorney General of the United States a Senator from Alabama who was once denied a federal judgeship because he was too racist. The NAACP and Black Senators and Congressmen say he is still too racist to be Attorney General. Many overt racists love our President-elect Donald Trump whether he is really a racist himself or not. Racism is very much alive among us, and God calls us to speak and act against it just as God called Martin Luther King to speak and act against it all those decades ago.

There are other issues we are called to speak and act about too. Climate change and environmental degradation. Income inequality. Questions of war and peace. Immigrants’ rights. So many others. And maybe you don’t think those are proper issues to discuss in a Christian sermon. Well, they are. They are because the Gospel of Jesus Christ is about all of them. It is about social justice as much as it is about anything else. It is about care for the poor as much as it is about anything else. It is about nonviolent resistance to evil imposed by governments as much it is about anything else. Most of all it calls us to claim our voice on these issues and to act to bring about justice for the poor, the marginalized, the excluded, the unheard. That’s what Martin Luther King did fifty years ago. That’s what Jesus did two thousand years ago. King was a Christian pastor, and he said “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” He condemned white church people like most of us for remaining “silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.” Those powerful words from his Letter From a Birmingham Jail pierce my soul today. They convict me today. They convict us today. They convict us because they speak the truth. They speak the truth about our remaining silent, staying safe, doing nothing in the face of racism and other evils.

The Gospel’s call is different. It is loud, it is clear, it is strong. We are called to act. I don’t know yet exactly how we are called to act, although people all around us are already organizing, holding demonstrations and marches, mobilizing for justice in a time when justice is very much on trial among us. I don’t know how much courage I have to act, though I’m sure it is not as much as I’d like. But I do know that the Gospel of Jesus that I proclaim and preach calls me to act. It calls us to act. I don’t know if I will. I don’t know if we will. Perhaps with God’s help we will find the courage we need to do it. May it be so.

Sunday, January 8, 2017

A New Way


A New Way

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 8, 2017



Scripture: Matthew 2:1-12



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 a familiar story. Some mysterious men called magi come to Bethlehem and encounter Jesus. They go see King Herod, who sends them to Bethlehem. They greet Mary, bow down before baby Jesus, and are warned in a dream not to return to Herod. So they depart from Bethlehem for home “by another route,” as the NIV puts it. This morning I want to look at this story not as a factual account of something that happened but as a symbol, as a symbolic story. A symbolic story is one that tells of people and events as though they were facts, which they may or may not be; but it tells the story not to convey facts but to convey a meaning much deeper, much more true, than any mere facts. A symbolic story points beyond itself to some important truth. Matthew’s story of magi is loaded with symbols that can speak profound truth to us if we will let them do it and not reduce this great story to mere fact. This morning I want to look at one symbolic meaning of Matthew’s story of the magi’s visit to the baby Jesus.

They come from afar, probably from Persia in what is Iran today according to the scholars. Wherever they come from that place is home. It is their starting place. It is where they have been formed. Where they learned their native culture and how to live in it. Where they learned the conventional ways and wisdom of their people. Where they learned their people’s religion—in their case probably Zoroastrianism—and made it their own. They live and work there with all the beliefs, superstitions, and prejudices of their people. Yes, they are wise men, so maybe they question or even deny some of those beliefs, superstitions, and prejudices; but they are still men of their time and place, men of their culture, established and respected there. Doing well materially there. After all, they had the freedom to leave there and undertake a long, time-consuming journey across the desert to Judea and back. They start from their home. That home represents their beginning place, and they come with all of the intellectual and spiritual baggage that that place has put upon them.

They’re home at first, but then something happens that shakes them loose, that pries them out of their starting place. They see an unusual star. Something new. Something unexpected. Something that piques their curiosity. They are, after all, thinkers. Wise men. So they want an explanation. They want to know why that odd star is there and what it means. We aren’t told how, but somehow they come up with the correct explanation. They decide that the star heralds something new, something special. They conclude that it heralds the birth of the long-expected Jewish Messiah, a newborn King of the Jews. We don’t know quite why that matters to much to these Gentile stargazers, but it does. I hear the story telling us that in their hearts they longed for something new, something better, a new revelation of God’s will and ways. Whatever the reason, they know they must go and pay homage to this mysterious new thing proclaimed by this mysterious new star.

So off they go. They don’t know exactly where they’re going, but because they believe that their star proclaims the coming of a new King of the Jews they know that they must go somewhere in Israel. So they go to Jerusalem, the only major city in Israel, to ask about a newborn king. Apparently no one knows anything about it, but King Herod hears about them; and he’s not happy. The Messiah would be an irresistible threat to his power. So he gets his religious experts—sort of a Council of Religious Advisors—to tell him where the Messiah was to be born. Bethlehem, they say. So Herod calls the wise men in and sends them to Bethlehem with the disingenuous request that when they have found the child they return and tell him where he can find the newborn Messiah so he too can go worship him. So off our wise men go to Bethlehem.

There they find baby Jesus. They find what they were looking for. They find the new revelation they had been seeking. It’s odd that what they were seeking would turn out to be a baby, isn’t it? After all, a baby can’t teach them anything new. He can’t even talk yet. He can’t do anything except be a baby like any other baby. Still, they give him gifts that say he is a king (gold), that he is a high priest (frankincense), and that he is mortal (myrrh). They confess through these gifts that Jesus is the one come from God to reign, to instruct, and to show God’s nature through his life and even through his death.

Herod told them to come back to him with the baby’s location, but they have a dream that warns them not to do that, so they set off for home. But they don’t go the way they came, through Jerusalem. They go home “by another route,” as the NIV has it. The King James Version says they go home “by another way.” However we say it, after the wise men have encountered Jesus they change their course. They turn to a new way. They don’t go back the way they came. Their journey is changed. It is diverted to a new way.

Folks, Matthew’s great story of the magi is a magnificent parable, a magnificent metaphor for the human spiritual journey and for how encounters with Jesus affect that journey. We all start somewhere, just like the magi did. We all have a home, a spiritual starting place that has formed us and given us at least some spiritual grounding. That spiritual home, our spiritual starting place, may be more satisfactory or less so. We don’t all start in the same place, but we all start someplace. Probably not in Persia, but someplace.

In Matthew’s story the magi’s starting place is a long way from where they eventually discern that they need to be. I looked it up on MapQuest. Even western Persia, where these guys presumably came from, is about 1,250 miles from Jerusalem. That’s a long way today by car, not that I’d recommend driving a car across Iraq today. It’s a long way by car, but it’s an incredibly long way on foot, or by camel. Matthew’s wise men started out a very long way from their destination. Sometimes we do too, figuratively speaking. Sometimes our spiritual journey covers a lot of territory and takes a lot of time.

Our wise men were supposedly wise by the standards of their time and place, but I think we can know that at some level of consciousness they knew something was missing. Maybe at first they weren’t really aware of what that was or even that anything was missing at all, but something made them aware that they needed something new. In Matthew’s story that thing is the mysterious star. With us it’s probably not a star that makes us sense that we need something we don’t have. Maybe it’s a feeling of emptiness inside. Maybe it’s a lack of inner peace. Maybe it’s a nagging question about life, death, and whether anything means anything at all. Maybe it’s a feeling of guilt over some wrong we know we’ve committed. Our mysterious star can be many different things. Whatever it turns out to be, we sense that our spiritual life is lacking. I think Matthew’s magi must have sensed that too.

So they set out to follow their star. It led them to Jesus, which turns out to have been where they needed to go. It may seem odd, but I think that whatever it is that is acting as our star can lead us where we need to go too. When we do the work of really understanding what we lack we can see what we need to satisfy that lack. Do our souls feel empty? We need substance to fill them. Do we lack peace? We need a gentle assurance of God’s grace to quiet our unease. Do we feel guilty? We need to know God’s forgiveness so that we can forgive ourselves. Follow your star, follow your lack, and you will discover what you need.

The magi’s star led them to Jesus. Our star, whatever it is, can lead us to Jesus too. After the magi had worshipped Jesus and presented their gifts they went home by a different way, a new way. Matthew says that’s because they were warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, but I think their new way has a deeper meaning too. In Matthew’s story their physical path is changed, and I invite us to think of that change as a metaphor for how encounters with Jesus change our spiritual path as well. After all, the magi’s encounter with Jesus wouldn’t mean much to them if all that happened was they came, knelt, left their symbolic gifts, and then went home unchanged, forgetting about Jesus. No, I think we are to understand that it wasn’t just their route home that changed. I think they were changed too. Changed inside, in their spirits, in their souls. Notice that the star doesn’t lead them home. They don’t need the star to lead them home because whatever that star represented in them had been satisfied by their meeting Jesus.

It can be the same with us. Jesus and the God we know in and through him can satisfy whatever lack we feel inside. Truly meeting Jesus can bring us peace, forgiveness, and a meaning our lives didn’t have before. Truly encountering Jesus, learning from him, and learning to lean on him can give our lives a direction they didn’t have before. The magi went home by a new way, and they went home new. So can we. We can if we will truly come to Jesus, if we will listen to him carefully and deeply and turn to him when we need guidance, strength, or peace.

Folks, we can be magi too. We can come from our starting places, our various spiritual homes, to seek what we need and find it in Jesus. Then we will be changed. That is the path of the Christian spiritual life. That is the journey to which God calls us. So let’s pack our camels and head out, heading for Jesus and new life. He’s waiting for us. Let’s go meet him. Amen.

Thursday, January 5, 2017

New Beginnings


New Beginnings

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 1, 2017



Scripture: Matthew 2:13-23.



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 New Year’s Day. Well, at least out in the world it’s New Year’s Day. The new church year technically began on the first Sunday of Advent back last November. But most of us think of January 1 as New Year’s Day, so New Year’s Day it is. We so love to celebrate New Year’s Day, to celebrate the coming of a new year. Frankly, I’ve never quite shared that enthusiasm. I haven’t stayed up ‘til midnight or opened champagne on New Year’s Eve in years. Maybe that’s because I can be such a rationalist, or maybe it’s just that I think too much. I mean, January 1 is after all a totally artificial human creation. So is the way we number the years, supposedly from the birth of Jesus but actually probably wrong about that by a few years. There are lots of different calendars around the world that number the years and say when they start very differently from the calendar we use. Calendars are totally artificial human creations with no cosmic significance.

So why do we get so excited when a number in our artificial calendar changes? In one very real sense nothing changes but a number, a number that it usually takes me weeks at least to remember to change when I’m writing a check. January 1 is, in my experience, never significantly different from December 31 except that there used to be the big college football bowl games on January 1. Sometimes there still are, but not always. So what’s the big deal?

Well, I think the big deal is that we love and always need new beginnings in our lives. We always hope that the coming year will be better for us and our families than the year that just ended was. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t; but we always hope and pray that it will be. We all know that our lives and the lives of our families could be better than they are. We all hope that they will be better, and changing the year on the calendar is a good occasion to raise up and celebrate that hope.

So as I was thinking about a worship service for New Year’s Day, which we don’t do all that often, I was thinking about new beginnings. What new beginnings do I need? What new beginnings does the church I serve need? What new beginnings does our world need? What new beginnings does God’s world need? And behind all of those questions is a much bigger one: What do God and our faith in Jesus Christ have to say about new beginnings? Now, I have neither the time, the knowledge, nor the ability to answer all of those questions this morning, so I want to talk with you about that last one. What do God and our faith in Jesus Christ have to say about new beginnings? I think we get some answers to that question from our scripture reading this morning from Matthew. It speaks profoundly about new beginnings.

In the passage we heard this morning Matthew tells a story of the holy family fleeing Judea to Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod and their return not to Bethlehem where they began in Matthew’s telling of the story but to Nazareth, far to the north in Galilee. That story is, among other things, a great metaphor for the human need of new beginnings. It starts with Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in a place of great peril. Herod is out to find this newborn King of the Jews and kill him. King of the Jews was, after all, what Herod was. He sure didn’t want some Johnny-come-lately Messiah usurping his and his family’s throne and power. Joseph and his family needed to flee, and in Matthew’s story that’s exactly what they did. They got safely to Egypt, where Herod wouldn’t get them.

They got themselves safely out of Herod’s reach, but they pretty desperately needed a new beginning even in the safety of Egypt. They were safe, but they were in a foreign land. A non-Jewish land for the most part. They presumably didn’t understand Egyptian culture. They presumably didn’t speak the language. Unless they were in Alexandria where there was a significant Jewish population at the time, and Matthew doesn’t say where in Egypt they were, there was probably no synagogue where they could worship their God. Egypt was safe, but it wasn’t home. It wasn’t where they belonged. They needed a new beginning, they needed to go home. They needed to go home, but home was Bethlehem in Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth, and they couldn’t go back to Bethlehem because of fear of Herod’s son. So they went to Nazareth in Galilee instead, where Herod’s son was not the ruler like his father had been. It was a long and difficult journey from Egypt to Nazareth, but there they could start over. There they could begin again. There they could have a new beginning.

This is a story about people who lived a long time ago in a place far away, but it is also a story about us. The holy family was in the wrong place, and we’re so often in the wrong place too. Perhaps we’re emotionally or spiritually in the wrong place. Or maybe we’re in the wrong job. Or living with the wrong people. Or living in the wrong physical place. Or maybe we haven’t forgiven as we should, haven’t loved as we should. Maybe we’re trapped in an addiction we can’t seem to free ourselves from. Maybe we’ve held on to unhealthy attitudes—perhaps prejudice and bias against people different from us. Maybe we’ve refused to consider challenging new ideas. Maybe we’ve closed ourselves off from people in need and clung to a comfortable life rather than take a risk for peace and justice. There are all kinds of ways in which we can be in the wrong place.

We’re probably in the wrong place in some way or other, and to have a new beginning we have to get out of that wrong place just like Mary and Joseph had to get of their wrong place, out of Bethlehem. When we do we may have first of all to spend some time at a way station, an in between place, like the holy family had to spend time in Egypt. It’s not home, and we still need a new beginning, but it’s a first step toward finding home, toward beginning anew. Eventually, if we do the work to get there, we’ll get to Nazareth. We’ll get to the right place.

That’s God’s promise to us on this New Year’s Day. The God of the ultimate new beginning, the God of the Resurrection, promises us all new beginnings when we need them. And we always need them. God knows we need them even when we don’t know that. When we don’t know we need them God is there working to remind us that we do. Even more importantly than that, God is there to guide us as we discern what new beginning we need. And God is there to encourage, support, and guide us, to celebrate our accomplishments and forgive our failures, for we humans always have failures.

So in this new year that begins today, let’s be about new beginnings, shall we? New beginnings in our personal lives, new beginnings in our church’s life, new beginnings in our nation’s life, new beginnings in the world’s life. If we will be intentional and prayerful about new beginnings, God will be there with us. With God we can indeed experience faithful new beginnings. Thanks be to God! Amen.