Prophet of Peace

Prophet of Peace

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 27, 2016

Scripture: Isaiah 2:1-5

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 is the first Sunday of Advent. Advent is the season of the church year when we anticipate and prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ at Christmas. Advent is in some ways a rather theatrical season. We suspend our disbelief and pretend that Jesus hasn’t been born yet, never mind that he was born over two thousand years ago. Advent is not Christmas, it is preparation for Christmas. Out there in the world it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, as the old song goes. In here it isn’t Christmas. It’s Advent. Christmas is coming. It’s on a Sunday this year, so in addition to our Christmas Eve service on the evening of the 24^th we will have a service on Christmas morning at our regular time. It will be Christmas then, but not now. Now it’s Advent.

Every year as we enter the season of Advent one question occurs to me more than any other: Who are we waiting for? The obvious answer of course is Jesus, but for me that response raises more questions than it answers. Who, after all, is Jesus? What does he mean for us? What does he mean for the world? How are we to understand him? The Christian church has long answered those questions by saying that he is the Son of God who came to earth for the purpose of suffering and dying to pay the price of human sin so that those of us who believe in him can go to heaven when we die. If that answer works for you, OK I guess. I won’t argue about it with you; but I am convinced from reading the Gospels that that is not primarily what Jesus was about. He was more about how God calls us to live this life.

Mostly he was about reviving the voice of ancient Hebrew prophecy. That part of the Hebrew tradition was already ancient by Jesus’ time. The voices he heard and echoed date mostly from the 8^th century BCE, more than seven hundred years before Jesus. That would be like someone today reviving a message from the 1300’s, which I’m sure sounds like a long time ago to all of us. It is a long time ago, and the Hebrew voices of faith that Jesus revived came from a long time ago in his time. One of those voices was the prophet Isaiah from whom we just heard in our first scripture reading. That passage gives us a wonderful vision of a glorious future of peace and international understanding and cooperation. It imagines that many people will come to Jerusalem to learn the way of the Lord, that is, of the god Yahweh, the god of the Hebrew people, the God we know as the one and only true God. It says God will settle the peoples’ disputes, which I think we can take to mean that the people will settle their own disputes peacefully because all of them will be seeking to follow the ways of God. Then there will be no more war. In some of my favorites lines from the whole Bible Isaiah says “They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.” Always reminds me of the old spiritual with the refrain “I ain’t gonna study war no more.” Isaiah then calls his people, and calls us, to that way of living when he says: “Come, O house of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”

And I suppose it’s natural to ask at this point: Why does the lectionary give us this text for the first Sunday of Advent? After all, it doesn’t mention Jesus. Christianity has long thought that Isaiah predicts the coming of Jesus (which I don’t), but there’s nothing in this passage that sounds like a prediction of a person. So why this text for the first Sunday in Advent? I think it’s because, although this text doesn’t predict Jesus, it points to something profoundly true about Jesus. This vision of a world at peace with no war is a vision that Jesus picked up hundreds of years after Isaiah. It is a vision he developed and proclaimed to his world and to ours. The ancient Hebrew prophetic call for a world at peace resonated in Jesus’ soul because he knew that God is a God of peace not war, a God of peace not violence, a God of peace not fear, a God of peace not anxiety. We Christians call him the Prince of Peace, and indeed that is what he is. He spoke of the Kingdom of God as a time on earth when God’s vision of peace for all the world becomes a reality.

For me, when I think of peace, I think first of all about an end to war and to all physical violence between people. Indeed, Jesus is our prophet of that kind of peace; and that kind of peace is really important. But it is equally true that peace is like an onion. There are many layers to it. I remember a quote that I think is from the Dalai Lama, although I couldn’t find it online. It goes something like: If you want peace in the world, begin by being at peace in yourself. The idea is that outer peace begins with inner peace. That’s an idea Jesus would fully embrace, for he sought to transform the world by transforming individual souls. So today as we think of peace, let’s think first of all about the inner peace we can find in our Lord Jesus Christ. He calls us first of all to inner peace, and we can find that inner peace in him. In him we can be at peace because in him we know that God loves us unconditionally. We know that God forgives us unconditionally. We know that God is our eternal home that awaits us at the end of our time on earth. He said “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” He said “I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” Matthew 11:28-29 That’s the inner peace we can find in him—rest for our souls. That peaceful rest in Jesus is the beginning of peace not only for our souls but for the whole world. If you want peace in the world, start with finding peace in your soul. That is a message I desperately need to hear today. Perhaps you do too.

Now, I’m preaching on peace today; but the Advent theme for this first Sunday of Advent is actually not peace but hope. So it occurs to me to ask: Is there really any hope for peace in the world? I sure struggle to find that hope these days, but I know that the answer to our search for a hope of peace is God. God is always the answer to any kind of hope. God is how we can hope for that which seems so unattainable in our lives and in our world. We can hope for peace or any other great thing that we lack because we know that God is present and active in our lives and in the world. God’s presence and activity in the world are always subtle. They’re always quiet. They can be hard to perceive, but they’re always there. Always working. Always calling us and the whole world to build that peaceful Kingdom of God of which Jesus spoke. So hope for peace? All the worldly evidence to contrary notwithstanding, yes. Yes, because God.

Recently I have seen two things that seem to me to be signs of a possible peace in the world. They are, of all things, two television commercials that are running this holiday season. One of them is an ad for amazon.com. In it a Muslim imam goes to visit his friend. An imam is a Muslim prayer leader, the closest thing Islam has to a priest or pastor. His friend is of all things a Catholic priest. They have a friendly visit. They talk. They laugh. In the course of their time together they both show signs of having knee pain. The imam bids his friend the priest good-bye. After he leaves, both of them unbeknownst to the other go online and orders his friend a pair of knee pads, from amazon.com of course. Both are surprised when their unexpected gift arrives. They both put on the pads and go to their places of worship, the imam to his mosque and the priest to his church. They both kneel on their new knee pads and pray. The ad doesn’t say so, but they’re both praying in their different ways to the same God, to the God of reconciliation and peace. That ad nearly brings me to tears, for it is a sign that some people in the world get it. They get it that peace and reconciliation are the way of God.

The other ad is for Apple, the computer company. It features Frankenstein’s monster. In the ad he appears as a large, dark, unhappy creature. The first thing he does is record a music box playing the song “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays.” He records it on an i phone of course, for this is an ad for Apple. Then he screws red and green Christmas lights into sockets in his neck, where they light up. He walks into a town where people are celebrating Christmas. The people shrink back. They’re afraid. They don’t know what this man who looks like a monster will do. He starts to play his recording and to sing “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays.” One of his Christmas lights goes out. A little girl beckons him to come to her. He does, and she tightens the light on his neck that has gone out so that it comes back on. She sings with him. Then everyone sings with him. They all relax and welcome him to their town. It turns out that this creature who everyone saw as a monster was just a lonely man looking for friendship and acceptance, looking for home. The ad ends with a line on the screen that reads: “Open your heart to everyone.” And I say thank you Apple, and amen. Open your heart to everyone indeed. That is the way of peace. That an enormous corporation like Apple would run an ad like this in a world like this is a sign of hope for peace, that peace we so lack and so badly need.

So in this Advent season as we await the birth of Jesus Christ, let us be at peace. And let us hope for peace in God’s world. Let us be hope for peace in God’s world, and let us start by being at peace in our souls. Let us begin by caring for the other, the stranger, the one very different from us, the ones who pray differently, the ones we might think are monsters when they really aren’t. Let us begin by opening our hearts to everyone. Then perhaps we will find the peace that Jesus brings. The peace that Jesus is. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Light in the Darkness

Light in the Darkness

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 13, 2016

Scripture: John 1:1-5

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.

(Take off stole) For a moment I’m going to speak for myself here. That’s why I have taken off my stole, the symbol of my status as an ordained minister and as your pastor. I’m going to speak for myself because I have to. If someone tells me that I can’t do that, that I’m only up here because I am the pastor of this church, I won’t argue with them; but I’m going to speak for myself anyway. I’m not speaking now in my role as your pastor. I’m speaking only as an American citizen. For me, last Tuesday, the world became a very dark place, much darker than I had ever thought of it being before. I don’t need to tell you about the result of our election of that day. You know it already. You know who won, and you know as much about that person as I do, maybe more. Some of you already know how I took that result. For the rest of you, I took it very badly. I reacted to it with powerful negative emotions, emotions of depression and even anger. I see nothing but harm coming from it, harm to our nation, harm to the world, especially harm to the vulnerable, to minorities, immigrants, non-Christians, and people with disabilities like my six-year-old granddaughter Calnan, who has a significant visual disability that will probably only get worse as she grows up. I grieve the result of our presidential election, and I suspect that I will for years to come. I never thought my country would make a decision I consider to be this bad, but it did. So I have prayed for help for my nation and for myself as we enter what I fear will be a very difficult time for us and especially for the ones Jesus called “the least of these.” I have struggled and continue to struggle with the question of how I can keep doing the work, the ministry, that I have been doing for years, for last Tuesday’s result frankly makes it all seem small and meaningless. Tomorrow I am going to a two-day retreat for UCC clergy on the subject of how to be the church. I am hoping that spending time with my UCC colleagues, as far as I know all of whom have reacted to the election much as I have, will help me get my feet back under me; for they sure haven’t been under me since last Tuesday. I hope you understand that I had to tell you what’s going on with me, for you need and deserve to know.

(Put stole back on) OK. I’m back as your pastor. One thing that Christianity has always known is that the world is a dark place. Our world today is hardly unique in being a dark place. There has always been war. There has always been injustice. There have always been charlatans and reprobates in seats of power. The good has always struggled with evil. Indeed, sometimes it seems to us Christians that the world is nothing but an arena for the cosmic struggle between good and evil. Frankly, I have never understood how Christians can see the world any other way, for we follow a Lord and Savior whom the darkness of the world tortured and executed as a common criminal, as a threat to public order. Yet we call our crucified savior the Son of God. We call him Emmanuel, God With Us. We call him God Incarnate. And the world killed him as if he were nobody. Yes, he rose again, but our faith truly grew out of the darkness of the world.

Our New Testament knows that. We heard it say it in our reading from John this morning. I used the New Revised Standard Version translation of those verses because they are the form in which I have long known these verses and because I think they are a better translation than the NIV we use here, especially in their last phrase. Those verses are the New Testament’s most profound proclamation of Jesus as God Incarnate. And they know that Jesus came precisely into a world of darkness. They are so profound that I’m going to recite them to you again. They say:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Jesus is the light of all people, and he came into darkness. His light shines in that darkness. And this Bible verse says “the darkness has not overcome it.” That’s the line that’s translated better in the NRSV than in the NIV. The darkness has not overcome it. Folks, I’ve had a hard time holding onto that one since last Tuesday, but I know it is true. The darkness of the world has never overcome the light of Christ. He is the light in our darkness. Thanks be to God.

This last week one of you forwarded to me a letter that proclaims not the light of Christ in the world exactly, for its author is Jewish, but the light of God in a world of darkness. That’s the same light that shines in Jesus. This letter is from Rabbi Will Berkovitz, the Chief Executive Officer of Jewish Family Services in Seattle. It is so beautiful and so powerful that I am going to share most of it with you. Last Wednesday Rabbi Berkovitz wrote:

"What happens now?" was the question my children asked me last night as I was putting them to bed. "What can we do? What will we do?"

We can hold our place while not denying others theirs. We can walk with the vulnerable so they know they are not alone. We can be a place of peace and not darkness. We can be kind with ourselves and others. And we can transform that kindness into deeds of love. We can acknowledge the fear and uncertainty that may exist within us, but to which we must not succumb. 
 
With clarity and conviction, we will re-affirm the core beliefs that have always guided us. We will value the dignity of each individual. The one who prays differently or not all. The one whose color, gender, education, sexual orientation, abilities, aspirations, ethnicity or geography is not the same as ours. The one whose experiences and worldview are different than our own. 

We will look within and re-commit ourselves to the work ahead. We will be a place of refuge and gathering where we respect and offer compassion to those who are most vulnerable, embracing the orphan, the widow, the stranger, the poor and the brokenhearted. 

One more time, we will remind our children and ourselves of our collective story, so each of us learns anew and remembers always there are reasons we are obligated to do all we can to repair what is broken. And we will come together to build sanctuaries of peace with the power to shine light out into the darkness.

Jesus is our light in the darkness, but other faiths also know that God is light in the world’s darkness. Rabbi Berkovitz speaks powerfully here of what God’s light, the light we know through Jesus Christ, means in the world today—and not just since last Tuesday. He speaks of what it means for all people of faith to be called to be that light in the world. For us it is Christ’s light, for Rabbi Berkovitz and others it is the light of God known in other ways, but it is the same light. To live in that light, indeed to be that light, means we walk with the vulnerable so they know they are not alone. We become a place of peace. We are kind with ourselves and others. We perform acts of love. We value the dignity of every person, even, or rather especially, those who worship differently than we do or don’t worship at all, those who differ from us in color, gender, education, sexual orientation, abilities, and ethnicity. We become a place of refuge where we offer respect and compassion to the most vulnerable among us. In the grand tradition of Jewish prophecy Rabbi Berkovitz lists the orphan, the widow, the stranger, the poor, and the brokenhearted as those who are most vulnerable. Those yes, but there are others too. Women, whose equal human value and dignity we men so often disparage and deny. Racial minorities, who live among us in a land founded in and deeply tainted by racism. Sexual minorities, who have been told for millennia and are still told today that they are somehow broken when they are no more broken than the rest of us. The immigrants living far from what was their home, hoping for a better life for themselves and their children. Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, and other religious minorities whom we Christians have told for centuries that their faith is false and they are damned if they don’t become Christian, a diabolical falsehood that far too many Christians still believe and still proclaim.

As Rabbi Berkovitz says, there are reasons we are obligated to do all we can to repair what is broken. The world didn’t break last Tuesday. It has been broken from its beginnings. It didn’t get dark last Tuesday, it has been dark from its beginnings. The reason we have to know that we are obligated to do what we can to fix it, that we are obligated to be Christ’s light in today’s darkness, is that we are Christians. We say that we follow Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ and as our Lord and Savior. He came as the Word of God in human form to be light in the darkness, and he came to tell us that we too are to be light in the darkness. We are to carry the light he brought into the world’s darkness and make the world brighter.

Folks, today God’s call to us to do that is more urgent than ever. More people than ever will need help. More people than ever will be afraid and need a safe place to be. Many already are and do. Some of them may be Christians, but most won’t; and that doesn’t matter at all. Some of them may be straight, able-bodied, and white like most of us, but most won’t; and that doesn’t matter at all either. Those things matter not at all in how we are called to be there for them, to be the light of Christ, the light of God for them, to assure them that they are dearly beloved children of God. To say you are valuable. To say you are loved. To say that regardless of what the world says to you, regardless of what your government says or does to you, you matter. You matter to us, and much more importantly you matter to God.

Being and doing those things is what it means to be Christian today. Not to be and do those things is to fail in our call to follow our Lord Jesus Christ. Are we willing to be Christians today? Are we willing to be the light of Christ for a dark and hurting world? May it be so. Amen.

What God Wants

What God Wants

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 30, 2016

Scripture: Isaiah 1:10-18; Luke 19:1-10

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.

Earlier this past week Jane and I went to breakfast at the Mountain View Diner in Gold Bar, something we do most every Tuesday morning. Recently they’d had a white board in their little entry way with sayings written on it. Last Tuesday there was one they identified as a Japanese proverb. It read: “Vision without action is a day dream, action without vision is a nightmare.” Now, that’s not a specifically Christian saying, but it points to a question that is an issue for all faith traditions, not just our Christian one. What is the proper relationship between religious belief and actions? To put it in more traditional Christian language, what is the proper relationship between faith and works? Are we saved only through God’s grace which we access through faith, as Paul, Martin Luther, and John Calvin contended? Or is faith without works dead, as the New Testament’s Letter of James contends? To put the question yet another way, what does God want from us? Does God want our faith in God and Jesus Christ? Or does God care more about how we live our lives, what we do and don’t do? To go back to the language of that Japanese saying I saw last week, does God want us to have vision, or does God want us to undertake good actions? That truly is a central question of the Christian faith.

I think our two scripture readings this morning shed a good deal of light on that question. I’ll start with the Isaiah. There the prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem, claiming to speak for God, condemns the people of Israel in very harsh terms, especially the leaders and rulers of the people. He calls them rulers of Sodom and people of Gomorrah, two notoriously sinful cities of Hebrew scripture, sinful mostly for how they abused strangers among them. Then he soundly rejects the people’s religious practices. In these passages God condemns and rejects their sacrifices, offerings, incense, religious holidays and festivals, even their prayer. Now, some people today may think that God is rejecting those things not because they worship but because they are the wrong kind of worship. After all, we don’t worship God by sacrificing, that is, ritually killing, animals. No Christians do, and I wouldn’t be a Christian minister if being meant I had to do that. We don’t use incense in our worship, although some Christians do. We don’t celebrate “New Moons.” So maybe we think that all those things that Isaiah lists and condemns are just the wrong kind of worship. But see, everybody in Israel in Isaiah’s time, including the prophet himself, was sure that all of those things were precisely the right kind of worship. This ancient Hebrew text is not saying that the people need better worship. It is far more radical than that. It is saying that God doesn’t want even the right kind of worship from them. God doesn’t even want their prayers, and surely prayers are appropriate from people of faith. God doesn’t want their worship or even their prayers because, the text says, their “hands are full of blood.” Because of the people’s “evil deeds.” Because they are “doing wrong” rather than doing right.

OK, but what’s wrong and what’s right? Our text from Isaiah certainly poses that question, and it answers it too. Immediately after it tells the people to “learn to do right” it says: “Seek justice, encourage the oppressed, defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.” That’s what right. Directly or indirectly Isaiah here raises the three types of people the Hebrew prophets typically called the people to protect and take care of. They are first of all the stranger, that is alien in their midst. Isaiah doesn’t mention this group explicitly, but he does indirectly when he calls out people he calls the rulers of Sodom. In the story in Genesis of Sodom a mob of supposedly straight men want to gang rape men who were staying temporarily in that city. The sin of Sodom is hostility toward the stranger, and Isaiah mentions it in our text. The other two groups the prophets typically call out for defense are the widow and the orphan. Isaiah here says the fatherless not the orphan, but in that strongly androcentric culture being without a father made you an orphan even if you still had your mother. Isaiah specifically mentions the widow. In that society a woman without a man to protect and take care of her was in a terrible state. These are the groups the prophets typically lift up because they were the most vulnerable people in those days, the ones who couldn’t care for themselves and had no one else to care for them either. So that’s what’s right. To care for the vulnerable. To lift up the oppressed.

Then there’s our reading from Luke about Jesus and Zacchaeus. Perhaps we miss the story’s point that Zacchaeus is a really bad dude. See, he wasn’t just a tax collector, which would have been bad enough. He was a “chief” tax collector. That’s a sort of wholesale tax collector. He paid assessed taxes to the Romans in advance, then hired others to go collect taxes from the people. They had to get enough to pay the chief tax collector back what he had already paid to the Romans plus profit for themselves and for him. Zacchaeus was so good at it that he’d gotten rich. The original audience for this story would have hated Zacchaeus with a passion as soon as they heard that he was a chief tax collector. Jesus saying that he was going to stay with Zacchaeus made the people angry with Jesus, and understandably so.

Yet in our story Zacchaeus apparently gets religion. He says he gives half of all he has to the poor. He says he will repay anyone he has cheated plus what in US law we call treble damages. Whereupon Jesus praises him highly. He says “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.” It is perhaps an odd way of praising Zacchaeus. What does he mean calling Zacchaeus a “son of Abraham?” Does that mean only that Zacchaeus was a Jew? Probably not, because Zacchaeus was always a Jew even when he was extorting excessive amounts of money from people. What Jesus means here, I think, is that Zacchaeus has finally figured out what being a person of faith, in his case the Jewish faith and in our case the Christian faith, is really about. It is about doing justice. The kind of justice Isaiah was taking about more than 700 years earlier. Justice as care for the poor and vulnerable. Justice as respecting all other people as children of God regardless of their life circumstances. Justice as honoring especially those society and culture dishonor. Lifting up those human society and human culture trod down. Lifting up those society and culture oppress. Affording equal dignity to those against whom society and culture discriminate. Supporting people and movements that advocate and do all of those things and opposing people and movements that don’t or that even advocate perpetuating society’s ills. That’s what Jesus is saying when he honors Zacchaeus, the former sinner, calling him a child of Abraham.

Now of course, we’re all at different stages of life. We all have different abilities and different resources. Of course God know that, and God doesn’t expect precisely the same things from all of us. Most of us come to a time in life when we are the ones who need care and aren’t in much of position to give care. God knows that. God respects us and is with us when we come to that point in life. There is grace in receiving care as much as there is grace in giving care. That’s all true. It is indeed divine truth. It is truth too many of us too easily forget. We want to be the care givers not the care receivers. Well, if what God wants from us is caring for those in need, then God cares for those in need. God cares for us when we are ill. God cares for us when we are poor. God cares for us when we are weak. God cares for us as we near the end of our lives on earth. Nothing in God’s desire that we do justice means that we are not also to receive justice, to receive care, when we need it.

That being said and truly meant, I am convinced that we Christians badly need to remember a truth that our faith tradition so easily forgets. Yes, God wants our faith. God wants our belief. God wants us to trust God and to rely on God. God wants us to see Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. But God also wants that faith of ours to change us. To transform us. To make us people of divine justice, the kind of justice Isaiah demanded. The kind of justice Zacchaeus demonstrated once he repented, once he turned around. I disagree with Isaiah here a bit. I think God does want our worship, but God wants our worship not because God needs it but because we do. God wants our worship because God wants us to repent, to turn around, to be transformed the way Isaiah wanted the people of ancient Israel to be transformed. The way Zacchaeus was transformed. That’s what God wants. Are we ready to hear? Are we ready to follow? May it be so. Amen.