I haven’t played Monopoly since about 1981, when my friend Chip and I were playing with his younger sister, Meig, and in retaliation for his landing on one her properties with a hotel on it, we made a rule that “mergers” were possible and then immediately colluded to bankrupt her as quickly as possible.

Meig responded by flipping over the board and shouting for their mom, which we richly deserved.

For many, cheating and making up new rules in the middle of the game is just part of playing Monopoly.

Well, it seems that the people at Milton Bradley have been listening.

This week, they announced a new brand extension called the “Monopoly: Cheater’s Edition.”

In addition to the standard game, the Cheater’s Edition comes with fifteen cheat cards with various little scams for players to attempt during the game — taking a little extra money from the bank, moving someone else’s token during your turn.

If you succeed, you apparently get extra cash or a free hotel for one of your properties.

But if you get caught, there are new consequences.

Either you have to pay out money, or instead of being sent to the “go to jail” spot, in what seems like a distinctly reality t.v. kind of twist, now you also get literally handcuffed to the game board itself.

This is all absolutely true.

Say what you will, it’s a very interesting way to try jazzing up Monopoly, which we’ve all been jazzing up on our own since the Great Depression.

When the game debuts, I’m sure there will be any number of thoughtful op-eds and blogs about what it means that breaking the rules is now officially considered part of the game itself.

But I wonder if that’s really the point.

Part of me wonders if the point is not about giving permission to cheat, but rather about introducing formal punishment for those who are caught doing it.

I wonder if the point is actually to enshrine a new kind of vigilance about the rules.

Because whatever thrill there is to be found in cheating at Monopoly, surely it will pale in comparison the thrill of seeing sweet, swift justice being done–oh, the pleasure of seeing your older brother or his friend now a prisoner, their arrogance finally exposed for all to see!

No flipping the game board in frustration ever again — let the truth be proclaimed to the last hotel on Park Place!

Stepping back, we can have such a strange relationship to winning, can’t we?

We can turn almost anything into a contest.

Maybe the game is Monopoly…or maybe the game is showing the world who your older brother really is…but in any case, let the games begin.

A pastor colleague of mine was once doing a graveside committal service in a cemetery out of his usual area, and he happened to pass by a random gravestone, and instead of name on the gravestone or the dates of a life, there were simply these words: “I told you I was sick.”

Pastor Shawn would probably call that the ultimate troll.

But if gestures like that suggest our strange relationship to winning, the deeper truth is that we have an even stranger relationship to living.

A life with winning at its center — with winning as its purpose — can turn out to be strangely misshapen.

We are built for more than just that.

II.

The Book of Ecclesiastes famously talks about the notion of life having seasons, lifting up “a time for every purpose under heaven.”

That points to Scripture’s view that there is something in us that is bigger than the vicissitudes of daily life…that there is something transcendent about our lives in God.

Ecclesiastes takes the view that God is to be found as much in losing as in winning, and that the point of life is to seek what abides, whatever the circumstances may be.

Our Gospel this morning is in that same vein.

As we’ve heard in Mark’s telling, Jesus has begun to speak directly about what will happen in Jerusalem — to tell the story of Good Friday and Easter that are yet to come.

It’s telling that what Peter seems to hear is just the Good Friday part, and he even goes so far as to take Jesus aside and rebuke him.

Peter is not entirely wrong, of course.

The other gospels record that Jesus’ preaching began to grow more foreboding as he got closer to Jerusalem, and that some of those who had been following him began to fall away.

So we can have a certain amount of sympathy with Peter, I think.

“Jesus, we have some great momentum going here. Let’s not blow it.”

“Jesus, we have to keep our focus on people’s hopes, not their fears.”

Peter is a loyal lieutenant who sees how important it is for this movement to succeed, and he wants to keep Jesus on message.

But on some level, maybe he’s also simply afraid of losing.

In fact, he’s so afraid, that he can’t hear that Jesus is talking about this thing that will happen…this moment in the life of God and the world that is going to blow the doors off.

What is about to happen is beyond those little categories of winning and losing, because God is so utterly beyond those little categories, and so utterly greater than these little games that people play.

Peter isn’t quite ready to hear that. He’s going to have to learn that lesson the hard way.

III.

But for us, maybe it doesn’t have to be quite that hard.

For one thing, I’m very certain God doesn’t want it to be.

If we’re having trouble hearing God, I’ve found that usually it’s not because God isn’t speaking…it’s typically because we’re having trouble really listening.

This morning, I’m particularly wondering if the prospect of winning or losing might be preempting much of our regularly scheduled programming, kind of the way the Olympics preempts so much else.

Do you watch for the medals…for who wins, or for who loses…or do you watch for something else…do you watch the games in another spirit?

Do we spend our time and energy focusing on life’s winning moments…or trying our best to steer clear of life’s losses? Or do we seek to live in a different spirit?

If we’re not careful, we can come to misunderstand what the real victories are — and the losses, too.

That’s what happened to Peter.

And yet wisdom is always eager to teach us, if we are willing to learn.

For the last couple of years, our daughter Grace has been involved with Girl Scouts, in a troop that meets right here at the church.

Part of that, of course, is that she is slowly beginning to gather merit badges for various kinds of things.

And there are times I look at her vest with its various badges, and I wonder, you know, what would it be like if we adults walked around with vests like that?

What would our badges be?

Would we only carry the badges of our victories?

“Hey, I see you got the CEO badge! I know you were really working for that one…way to go!”

“Hey, is that a law school badge?” (Or a “first time parent” badge, or a “speaks fluent Spanish” badge?)

Or would we have badges for the wisdom we gain in other ways?

Shouldn’t there be a badge about caring for an aging parent or spouse…a badge for getting downsized at work, or a badge for divorce?

Isn’t there wisdom in those moments? Isn’t there holiness in those moments?

And if our answer to that is no…or not really…then what does that tell us about whom we’ve become?

IV.

As we prepare our hearts for Easter this year, we’re invited to rejoice God’s victory over death and over all that diminishes human life.

Yet it is the victory of a wisdom that is bigger than winning and losing as we typically think of them.

Because in Good Friday and Easter, God shows us that love is always present, always at work, always poised to make a difference.

Whatever the game is, Easter breaks its every rule.

Because God is never finished with us. God is never out to beat us. And life is not either.

No matter what we may do, no matter what may happen, we are never handcuffed to the board.

And so we are invited to live our lives, learning as we go, and finding God in the midst of all of it, good and bad.

In these weeks of Lent, as we live with Easter particularly in mind, may we ask ourselves what it is for us to win and to lose, and invite ourselves to listen for the God who abides with us and loves us above and beyond any contest, any challenge, and any final score.

Amen.

Last week, I was reading online about a controversial new start-up venture in Brooklyn, called “Bodega.”

Bodega is a vending machine, of sorts, filled with a little bit of everything you might suddenly run out of in your apartment–from Campbell’s Soup to salsa to toilet paper or tums.

You know–the kind of little things that if you actually from Brooklyn you might run out and grab from an actual bodega.

It made me remember the bodega in my neighborhood when I was growing up. It was called Dom’s.

There’s a lot I could say about Dom’s.

But what I am particularly remembering today was a little faded cardboard sign that Dom had on his cash register.

It said, “Hoy no se fia, manana si.”

Hoy no se fia, manana si.

I didn’t know Spanish then. In fact, I still have not gotten to that yet.

So for a long time, I did not know what that meant.

Until one day, I noticed that someone else had written on the sign with a fresh, blue marker.

And what they wrote was this: “In God we trust. All others pay cash.”

II.

Our Scripture this morning is asking the question of what it is to trust in God.

You may not have recognized it right away, but the story comes from the Old Testament account of the prophet Jonah.

It was written likely sometime after 500 BC, but it seems to remember a time at least a century earlier, when the Assyrian Empire, in modern-day Iraq and Iran, was powerful and a very dangerous adversary to the nations of Israel and Judah.

Nineveh was the largest Assyrian city, located on the Tigris River, where the city of Mosul now sits.

And the prophet Jonah was profoundly concerned with the threat of the Assyrians, and felt called to warn the people of Jerusalem that if they did not follow God, the Assyrians might well become the instrument of God’s judgment.

This had happened before.

So you can imagine Jonah’s shock when in the midst of this campaign he hears a new message from God.

God has a mission for him.

God wants him to go, but not out into the streets of Jerusalem.

God wants Jonah to go to Nineveh. To convince them to repent. To save them from the full fury of God’s judgment.

It’s worth noting that Jonah’s best work as a prophet would turn out to be saving the people of Nineveh–which is to say, saving the sworn enemies of his own people.

Jonah sees that coming from the moment he hears God’s message.

The whole thing about the whale–you probably remember that Jonah’s story has a whale in it–the whole thing about the whale is about how Jonah sees God’s mercy coming for the people of Nineveh and tries running the other way.

But to no avail.

In the end, in part thanks to a whale, Jonah convinces the people of Nineveh to repent of their sins, which is something he never achieves with his home audience, back in Jerusalem.

So it’s a strange story, even as stories of Israel’s prophets go…and there are some strange stories when it comes to the prophets.

Jonah takes the whole idea of being a reluctant prophet to a whole new level.

If there’s a lesson to be learned that God is bigger than one people or nation, or that God’s mercy is overflowing and can touch lives even in the most unlikely places and circumstances, well, unfortunately, the prophet Jonah has no interest whatsoever in hearing about any of that.

God seems to have a bigger picture in mind, somehow–and usually prophet stories are about how one person feel called to proclaim that bigger picture to a skeptical audience that’s fallen out of tune with God.

Not here.

Prophets push us to engage morally in ways we don’t find easy to do, but which prove right in the end.

But on this particular occasion, the prophet has no feel for God’s bigger picture.

And actually, this has a lot to teach us.

Because note this: it’s not that Jonah doesn’t believe in God.

God is very much alive in Jonah’s life.

Yet their relationship is a strange one.

When Moses came into the presence of God, he took off his shoes. He had to go up mountains.

Not Jonah.

He treats God’s marching orders like a message from his bossy older brother.

Bring your word to Nineveh, God? Really? You can’t make me.

Get me swallowed by a whale and spat out three days later on the shores of…Nineveh? Fine. I’ll say what you tell me. But even you can’t make me mean it.

Make me watch as the people of Nineveh repent and change their ways? Well, God, I hope you’re happy because now you’ve gone and ruined everything.

In the Scripture we’ve heard this morning, we see Jonah’s anger, even misery, at being the human instrument of God’s great love and mercy.

And so again: Jonah knows that God is utterly real, utterly compelling, utterly powerful, and utterly interested in what’s happening in the world.

But what I want to suggest is that, on a deeper level, Jonah doesn’t have that much faith in God.

III.

Actually, the story of Jonah tells us something about faith.

Because faith isn’t just about knowing that there is a God above.

That part is important. It’s really important.

But it’s only a small part of it to think of God as actually “up there” somewhere.

Really, faith is more about trusting in God.

And maybe this is where we aren’t as different from Jonah as we might like to think.

Because how hard would it have been for Jonah to trust in God if God had said, “Jonah, I’m going to send you on a mission to destroy Nineveh–to speak the words that will rain down my justice upon them”?

I suspect Jonah would have liked that just fine and would have found that easy to trust in.

Trusting God when God tells us to rest in our own familiar assumptions is not a particularly hard sell.

But to hear the voice that calls us out to a distant, even hostile place…to go out in pursuit of a goodness that looks strange to us…to act in the name of hope and life…to do that demands genuine trust in the One who calls us.

It demands a profound confidence in the vantage point of a bigger view.

Not everyone gets there.

As that sign from my childhood cautioned us all: “In God we trust. All others pay cash.”

The story of Jonah cautions us that it doesn’t take much for us to become the kind of people who want even God to pay cash, just like everybody else.

IV.

Despite that, every day, there are people who hear a voice–the voice of God…who feel the wind of the Spirit moving across the face of the deep in our own hearts…who cringe at the unexpected record scratch of conscience.

Every day, there are people who hear the voice and decide to trust in it, even though they may not want to.

Even though it asks something very hard of them.

Let’s not forget that such trust is all around us, too.

Every person in recovery will tell you that they’re there because they’ve decided to trust that voice….

There are those young people who decide that someone else’s definition of who they are and what they might achieve no longer resonates with the voice they hear inside…and they decide to trust that voice….

There are those arguments we have with the people we love, and those times when we just don’t think that we are wrong…not this time…and yet we slowly recognize that we still feel sorry, that perhaps the issue is bigger than just one particular point or principle…or that, just maybe, something very different is what’s actually at stake…and hard as it is, we decide to trust that voice.

We know the voice.

We may not always like it. But we know it.

And the question we need to ask and to keep asking is what we will do when we hear it.

When that happens, we particularly need to remember: such a moment is the very kind of moment to which the prophet Jonah could not rise.

Yet it is precisely in such moments that Jesus calls us to come, take up our cross, and follow him.

V.

We do not always get it right.

Part of life is learning from our capacity to misplace our trust, and even to feel that God truly wants something for us, only to realize later that we were mistaken, and that the voice we heard was not God’s voice.

Part of growing in spirit may well mean that our trust is deeper, but in some ways harder won.

But in a world that tells us, time and time again, “In God we trust. All others pay cash,” to be faithful is to model a very different kind of trust, and not just in God, but in all others, too.

It may lead us into places that we scarcely wish to go, at least at first.

But it ends, not in frustration and anger, as it did for Jonah, but a sense of joining in the very joy of a world made new at last…a world whose manana has finally arrived.

Amen.

This morning’s Scripture challenges us to think about forgiveness.

In Genesis, we have just a small snippet from the longer, wonderfully complex story of Joseph.

If all you know is the part about the Technicolor dream coat, you’re missing out.

In today’s small bit, Joseph forgives his brothers for their treachery way back when and he suggests that, as he sees it, it wasn’t their treachery that was happening, but actually God working in one of God’s mysterious ways, putting the wheels in motion for Joseph to save them all and many others besides.

So Joseph says, “You meant to do me harm; but God meant to bring good out of it by preserving the lives of many people, as we see today. Do not be afraid. I shall provide for you…” (Genesis 50:21).

And then in Matthew’s Gospel, Peter asks: “Lord…how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”

Jesus answers, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy times seven.”

Then he goes on to tell the parable of an unforgiving servant, generously freed from a multi-million dollar debt for which he is on the verge of defaulting, but who then fails to show that same generosity toward someone who owes him about forty dollars.

It’s very much in keeping with an earlier moment, also in Matthew, when Jesus asks, “Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” (Matthew 7:3)

The unforgiving servant is chasing after a mote of debt, having apparently forgotten the crushing beam of his own debt that has been lifted from him.

The implication is clear:

As any of us consider what to do when we are asked to forgive–whether to do it or not…to mean it or not…to expect something further or not…as any of us consider what to do when we are asked or challenged to forgive, let us be mindful also of that within ourselves that might need forgiving.

Maybe, as Genesis suggests, God is somehow already at work for a greater good, even in what hurts us now.

Or maybe in those moments when we are especially poised to judge…ready to deploy the long, bony finger of blame…we need the humility to remember what it is to need forgiving.

We all do things we later come to regret and then can’t easily fix.

We know what that’s like.

But what I think Jesus wants us to see this morning is that while it is bad, indeed, to do wrong…to sin…there is another kind of danger that lurks even in being right.

So often, it turns out that we’re not quite as right as we think.

Quite often, we also find that being right doesn’t mean quite as much as we might be inclined to believe.

Has anyone here ever really sinned? I mean really sinned…can I get a show of hands… (o.k., just kidding….)

Well, if you have really sinned, then you know that all too often, there is a point where someone who is mad at you, and justifiably so, leaves off with being right, and instead becomes self-righteous.

It does not mean you were not wrong to do whatever it was you did.

And yet, somehow, the moment is not quite so simple as that.

Back in the 70s, the psychoanalyst Eric Berne argued that a lot of human interaction was not all that spontaneous, but was actually a kind of endless sequence of unconscious games people play (which is also the name of his book).

In fact, to prove this idea, he went on to name about fifty of the most important of those games.

“Ain’t It Awful” was one–the kind of interaction we might have while waiting on a grocery store line, or at coffee hour–those strange, one-upping kinds of conversations where you talk about how the world is falling apart, with each example more awful than the last.

But the game that especially applies this morning is the one Berne calls “Now I’ve Got You (You SOB)”–it describes those moments when someone is not so secretly gleeful to have caught you doing something wrong, because whatever it is, all their totally unrelated anger at you for anything and everything is suddenly poured into that one specific thing, and on that narrow question, they have you dead to rights.

“Now I’ve Got You.”

If Berne is correct, then the simple question of right and wrong doesn’t turn out to be all that simple, much of the time.

And if there is a part of us that wants it to be, well, Jesus would have us be very wary of that part of ourselves.

Does anybody really want to be Miss Havisham, the old lady in the gloomy mansion, still sitting there among the cobwebs in her decaying wedding dress, with the wedding feast still on the table, withered and spoiled?

Because you know what? In the matter of what had put her there in the first place, she was “right.”

Clearly, she had been wronged by the man who had left her at the altar all those years ago…and yet…awful as that was…unfair as it had been…though she was clearly in the right to be so hurt…somehow her life had not become what being right is supposed to look like.

Instead, she had let herself become prisoner to a kind of truth that could not set her free.

The truth that sustains us is the truth that challenges us…that expands us…that teaches us to open our minds and our hearts, and not to close them.

So if it turns out that that kind truth is not the truth we’re after just now, Jesus would have us look in the mirror–and look to God.

And he would have us hold back on deploying the long, bony finger of blame.

Again, as Jesus asks: “Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

It isn’t that we’re wrong, entirely. It isn’t that there isn’t something there.

It’s that, if we’re not careful, our lives can shrivel up like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake.

If our lives become nothing more than round after round of the “Now I’ve Got You” game, then really what we’ve got is nothing at all.

 

II.

 

That said, if all we do is forgive everything…all the time…it isn’t long before we end up being doormats.

After all, there are some things that really shouldn’t be forgiven…some wrongs that cannot be justified.

If we believe in a moral universe, then, on some level, we must hold that to be true.

Jesus himself says: “if anyone causes the downfall of one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for him to have a millstone hung round his neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea. Alas for the world that any of them should be made to fall! Such things must happen, but alas for the one through whom they happen!” (Matthew 18:6-7 REB).

God’s justice is a real thing.

But more to the point, if our great invitation and our great challenge is actually to love one another, clearly part of that is to care enough to say hard things. And to sit there listening when someone has hard things to say to us.

Neither is easy.

Working things through is a part of forgiveness.

And while it not always possible to work things through successfully, it is far more faithful and far more loving to have tried valiantly and failed than it is to pretend that there was never anything to forgive in the first place, and to breezily let things go.

Christ calls us to love one another, not to enable one another.

But without one another, we cannot become the people that God calls us and needs us to become.

I can’t help but think of Miss Havisham again.

Because for all her failings, there are also the failings of all those people she once knew…the people who should have been there to push her…with great patience and great love, of course…but nevertheless, the commitment to her good that would help her find the strength to live again.

The story seems to suggest that this would not have been possible. And perhaps not, in a story.

But in life, it is possible.

And it’s important that we try.  That’s part of what loving each other is all about.

III. 

Now…if I’ve made this case correctly, by now you should be playing in your mind some sort of highlight reel of your relationship with someone.

Some people have the premium package and are sort of surfing between several different highlight reels at once. That’s o.k.

But as you’re doing that, you may see that, just as Genesis argues, there was something very hard but ultimately good in some moment you’ve been carrying that has seemed unforgiveable.

Or you may simply hear the call of Jesus to love someone enough to try again…to believe enough in their capacity for change and growth that you are willing to try working things through.

Or if that window is no longer open, then you may hear the challenge to live without bitterness, without the self-righteousness that finally makes us smaller.

But whatever you hear, whatever it is you see on that highlight reel, hear again Jesus’ invitation to live fully and joyfully.

He calls each of us to come and find new life in him…to live once more…with feeling.

May we find the courage to do just that.

 

Amen.

Last week, I tuned into the concluding episode of a five-episode reality t.v. show called, “The Sisterhood.”

I’m sorry to say it, but I don’t think it’s destined to be a big network phenomenon, like, say, “Survivor” or “Honey Boo-Boo.”

You see, “The Sisterhood” chronicles the ups and downs of a group of young women who are thinking of becoming nuns.

Now, I can’t say for sure just how much reality there is to this reality t.v. show.

It seems to me that it must be hard enough to find five young women who are actively considering becoming nuns; however, finding five particularly telegenic young women who are also interested in becoming nuns must be even harder.

Some had clearly been feeling a pull toward religious life for many years, while for others it was a more recent feeling, and so they began this period of close discernment in very different places.

Almost all of them came from large, close, and deeply religious families—the kind of families where dad stood and offered a formal blessing when it was time to drive to the convent, and the parents shared their long-held hope that God would call at least one of their children into formal religious life.

My favorite part of the whole thing was watching each—contestant doesn’t seem like the right word…but…well, contestant—arrive at the convent, and having the sisters come out to greet them.

The sisters were unfailingly kind and welcoming. And they sized up each young woman in about ten seconds. Charitably, of course. But dead-on accurately.

In the end, as the sisters clearly anticipated, some of the young women decided that being a nun was not for them. More than one felt in all sincerity that Jesus was asking her to come and be his bride. And some realized they still needed more time.

But what was fascinating was watching them return home to share the news, whatever it was, with their families.

And I was actually quite surprised that the ones who had the very hardest time were the ones who felt the clearest call.

One mother burst into tears and blurted out, “But now you’ll never live down the street and let me take care of your babies!”

And one father, after responding to the news with a prolonged, and ominous silence, finally said, “It seems to me that this is all pretty sudden, wouldn’t you say?”

These reactions were surprising, and yet: what parent doesn’t understand, at least a little bit?

Because teaching our children to love and follow the Lord is one thing, but seeing them love and follow the Lord right out the door and out of our lives is something else, entirely—and it calls for a very different kind of faith.

II.

The Bible doesn’t tell us how Mary’s parents responded when she told them the news that she was with child, and that the child was not the product of some youthful indiscretion, but rather a unique sign of divine favor.

But it isn’t hard to imagine her father responding a little bit like the father I just mentioned…responding with a prolonged, ominous silence and then saying “It seems to me that this is all pretty sudden….”

Because it is sudden.

It must have been sudden for all of them.

We often forget that—we who live on the other side of the resurrection, when the great role that God asks this young girl to play in His plan seems like the ultimate low-risk/high-reward kind of proposition.

We forget how suddenly Mary is thrown into this whole thing.

Generations of artists have treated her with kid gloves – depicted her as a renaissance lady, with a royal blue cloak and alabaster skin and a great open, oval face, and a serenity about her that is as deep as the ocean.

According to Luke, the angel appears and says to her: “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you!”

And then Luke says, “But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.”

And that sounds so…grounded…doesn’t it?

But if you look a little closer, it’s clear that this moment is way beyond “perplexing” for Mary, who would have been in mid-teens at this time—in our culture, she would be considered still very much a girl.

Luke’s word for “perplexed” is diatarasso, and it means, actually: “agitated greatly” or even “troubled greatly.”

And while we’re looking up words, it’s important to note that when Luke says that Mary “pondered what sort of greeting this might be,” the word for ponder, dialogizomai, means “bringing together different reasons, revolving something around in one’s mind.”

It’s not a word that particularly suggests serenity—it’s more of a word for a mind that’s suddenly thrown into overdrive—a word for those arguments you have with yourself when you’re trying to get to the bottom of something and don’t know quite where or when it is you’ll come down.

And yet, the remarkable thing, of course, is that for all her agitation, for all her mind spinning, for all the suddenness of this breaking news from the messenger of God, this girl Mary doesn’t say no, and she doesn’t say that she needs more time to discern.

She says yes to God.

For all her questions, for all her doubts, for all the sheer surprise of the whole thing, for all her youth, she still says yes.

III.

And yet: don’t you wonder what her parents said when they found out?

I do.

I just can’t help but ask: how was it for them to learn that the God they had taught their daughter to love and follow was telling her to love and follow him right out their front door?

Did they think that God worked that way?

Or were they more like the kind of people who expected religion to be about tartan skirts, and not wearing makeup, and obeying your mother and father? Or about cultivating a kind of unobjectionable goodness, or acquiring a confirmand’s knowledge of the basics so that religion would, well, have its rightful place in her life, and her life would have its rightful place in the eyes of all the neighbors, going forward?

Is that who they were?

If so, then what was it like to see God leading her right out of the respectable world of Nazareth and forward into who knows what?

Luke’s gospel never explains it, but Luke writes this in the very next two verses after this morning’s lesson: “Soon afterwards Mary set out and hurried away to a town in the uplands of Judah. She went to Zechariah’s house and greeted Elizabeth” (Luke 39-40).

And we’re never told if this is was because Elizabeth was also with a child, conceived under miraculous circumstances…or if the reason was simply that Mary’s parents could not handle what God had handed them. Could not handle the sidelong looks. The smirks. The lively conversation among the neighbors that suddenly went silent as they walked by.

So, in the wake of Mary’s news, it seems all but certain that there would have been plenty of agitation in addition to hers, and at least two other people in her house whose thinking was also suddenly thrown into overdrive.

I’ve mentioned before the quotation from the philosopher William James, who once wrote, “…in some individuals religion exists as a dull habit, in others as an acute fever” (from The Varieties of Religious Experience).

What was it like for Mary’s parents to discover that, thanks to the intervention of God’s own angel, their daughter had caught religion like an acute fever?

Don’t you wonder what they thought? I do.

IV.

To me, that’s also why it’s so important that we tell this story now, just before Christmas Eve—just before the great celebration of God’s coming to be among us so that He might reach us, once and for all.

So that our redemption in his undying love would be secured at last.

With everything that has sprung up around Christmas, the way it often speaks most deeply to us is not in its festivity, but in its traditions, in its serenity, and in the eloquence of a silent night.

Silent nights are so powerful, and especially evocative to a people trying to make it through so many screeching days.

We are to be forgiven, I think, if part of what speaks to us so deeply about Christmas is that image of Mary in her royal blue mantle, silently…serenely…taking in the wonder of it all.

But it’s supposed to be something much deeper, and if we would truly journey to the heart of Christmas, we need to go beyond that healing silence, however much we may need, or even crave it.

We need to say yes to God, who comes to us at Christmas, who calls to us to follow him, and to help build his Kingdom—who dreams for us that as we near the end of our lives, we will be able to look back with a clear conscience and a full heart, and the sense that, when it mattered, we did our very best to follow His rules and nobody else’s.

God came down at Christmas so that you and I, and those we love, and those we seek to serve—and in the fullness of time, all people and all Creation—would catch that acute fever that Mary had.

God came down at Christmas so that for all our questions, for all our doubts, for all the sheer surprise of the whole thing, we might say yes to Him.

Take us where it may. Ask of us what He will.

God came down at Christmas so that whether our faith leads us out the door or right back in, off to the convent or onto some entirely different stage, among the respectable or the downright scandalous, all our paths would lead us back to Him.

At Christmas, we celebrate the beginning of that journey.

And we pray for the grace and courage to set out in search.

In January 1980, my parents bought a sweet, but unprepossessing little house in Brooklyn—the former carriage house of a church that was itself limping along at the end of our block.

On the day we moved in, the ground floor of the house was a three-car garage.

When my father pleasantly told one of our new neighbors that we had big plans for the house, and that we were going to fix it up, and convert the garage into our living room, the neighbor started arguing.

It turned out he had one of the three parking spots, and wanted to convince us that the place was better off being left exactly as it was.

That turned out to be a minority view.

Over the next year or so, my parents began talking with architects and others about their plans for a major renovation. And time after time, the architect would arrive and try to talk them into changing everything—into tearing the house down and starting over.

The most memorable to me was the one who arrived, flashed a big dramatic smile, looked at my mother and said, “The moment I saw you folks, I could tell you were land people.”

I’m still not sure what that means.

But I can tell you that, to him, it mostly meant a new three-story house on the front of the lot, with our little carriage house becoming a mother-in-law apartment and laundry room at the back.

Eventually, of course, the plans came together and what emerged was a wonderful place—thanks almost entirely to my mother, who could see potential that nobody else could see.

But it was an education for all of us.

And it’s no exaggeration to say that at almost every step of the way, the idea of renovating an old house—of repairing what was broken and giving it new life—seemed downright crazy to many.

It was then I learned that repairing what is broken can be a radical act, indeed.

Throwing it away—tearing something down and starting over simply because, well, why on earth wouldn’t you just do that?—makes a lot more sense to a lot more people.

This past summer, as Tony Izzi was putting the finishing touches on a car he had been lovingly restoring for several months, Grace asked me if his car was broken.

“Not really,” I explained. “He is fixing his car for fun.”

“Why doesn’t he want a new car?” was her response.

…How early it starts….

Time will tell, I guess, if Grace comes to understand this particular kind of fun.

As I said, repairing what is broken can be a radical act, indeed.

II.

 This morning’s Scripture from Isaiah is also, at its heart, a promise about rebuilding.

“They shall build up the ancient ruins,” he says, “they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations” (Isaiah 61:4).

And what he’s talking about is the rebuilding of Jerusalem.

He is imagining the day when God’s people, exiled in Babylon when these words were written, will be freed to return home—freed to get about the work of rebuilding their lives—rebuilding their civilization—rebuilding the walls of their city, and of the Temple, which had become the center of their faith.

What Isaiah is imagining is a new start, of course, but not a tear down. It’s an act of renewal, a renovation—a faithful process of bringing new life to old stones.

We tell it at Christmas because of its opening lines, which read, “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor…” (61:1-2).

It is a reasonable job description for Jesus, of course.

In fact, Luke’s Gospel even tells us that it is these very words that Jesus reads in his home synagogue at Nazareth, before he shocks them all by adding: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4).

The hometown crowd doesn’t like that.

They don’t like that the carpenter’s son, who was a nice enough kid but always a little out there, is suddenly looking at the old, old promises of Israel’s prophets and acting like he’s looking in the mirror.

They don’t like to have the ancient promise of the messiah mocked in this way, which is, for sure, how it sounds to them, because Jesus the carpenter’s son isn’t anyone’s idea of a messiah – except maybe for his mother’s, and there were plenty of rumors about her in her own right, and about that convenient little out of town trip down to Bethlehem all those years ago….

The people of Bethlehem, the hometown crowd, doesn’t like hearing these words from Isaiah quoted back at them—not by him—not by Jesus—not when he says that today these words have been fulfilled in their hearing because, Lord, look around: how could that be?

The messiah they were hoping for was a lot more like your typical leading man.

To hear Jesus claiming the mantle? That was like sending in Ryan Gosling to star in a John Wayne movie, and…just…come on….

And that’s true because, on some level, they are seeing what’s ahead, what’s on the horizon, as a massive tear-down.

That Rome’s unjust occupation will be torn down. That the misery of the people will be torn down. That the power and influence of the faithless collaborators among them will be exposed and torn down.

That a great general, a military commander will come from among them, somewhere, and yes, maybe he would be as improbable as King David himself had been at first, or even Moses…but wherever it was he would come from, he would be tough as nails and destined to win.

And that’s what they were looking for.

Because that tearing down was going to be glorious. Truth be known, they could hardly wait for the messiah to show up with his wrecking ball.

III.

 And so when Jesus reminds them about Isaiah, reminds them about rebuilding, and calls them to renewal, maybe the real issue isn’t even that Jesus suggests that he is the fulfillment of that Scripture.

Maybe the real issue is that what Jesus says, and what Isaiah says, is that the real work is the work of rebuilding. The work of repairing.

Much as we dream of starting fresh, starting over—of sweeping aside what’s broken and moving on—the fact is, we can’t.

And we can’t because most of what’s really broken in our world is in ourselves.

We can’t just throw away our own brokenness, however much we might like to.

By way of analogy: a story caught my eye this week about how Atlantic City is falling on hard times, again, with many of its casinos already closing or soon to close.

It has gotten so bad, in fact, that not only has Donald Trump pulled up stakes from Atlantic City. He sold his casinos there about two years ago, before things got bad.

But now, he is apparently suing the people who bought his casinos so that he can have his name removed from the buildings entirely so that his name won’t be associated with their seemingly inevitable bankruptcy.

Now, in fairness, most of us don’t have to think of ourselves as a brand the way Donald Trump does.

And yet, on some level, it comes across as if he’s trying to wipe his fingerprints off of the city and simply sneak away.

Who wouldn’t?

Whether it’s a bad investment, or a bad marriage, a bad career choice or a bad attitude, in general, who wouldn’t want to sneak away?

And yet, however much we might like to, we can’t just throw away our own brokenness—and though it is hard to admit, so much of what’s broken in our lives comes from within us, and not from outside us.

The real bankruptcy is us.

As a result, even when we succeed in sneaking away, so often we find that, wherever it is that we gravitate to next, the same old problems return.

Because the real problem is that we have not changed.

IV.

Christmas is a way to acknowledge the coming of a new and better world.

A new and better you and me.

The language of the Church in these weeks before Christmas is often the language of the end of the world—the language of tearing down, of a raging fire that will destroy all that is unworthy and refine all that is worthy in us and in our world.

But today, we are called to remember that the real work—the real message of Christmas—is not pointing to a work of destruction, but rather, toward a labor of love…toward a patient rebuilding….toward a dedicated repairing of all that is broken in the world…beginning with all that is broken within us.

The Messiah comes, not as a general who will sweep away all oppression, but as the Holy Child, whose vulnerability will teach us to see the vulnerability in all of us, ourselves included, and teach us to become, not warriors, but peacemakers.

The Messiah comes as one who will destroy all that is false in the world, and in our lives, not with the might of his hand, but with the depth of his truth and the wonder of his love.

He comes not to tear things down, but to lift us up, because he sees potential in us that maybe nobody else has ever quite managed to see.

He comes because he knows that there is life in us yet…and, namely, that there is life in us, if only we will come to recognize the life that is in him.

I want to begin this morning with some words from the Hebrew Bible—and specifically, from the Book of Deuteronomy.

It may sound long after a moment, but stick with it.  See if it resonates with you.

“For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams,with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills,a land of wheat and barley,of vines and fig trees and pomegranates,a land of olive trees and honey,a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper.

You shall eat your fill and bless the LORD your God for the good land that he has given you. Take care that you do not forget the LORD your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today.

When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them,and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied,and all that you have is multiplied,then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrible wilderness,an arid wasteland with poisonous snakes and scorpions.

He made water flow for you from flint rock,and fed you in the wildernesswith manna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good.

Do not say to yourself, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.”

But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth,so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today” (Deuteronomy 8:7-18).

Well…allow the preacher to say there is some real preaching going on in this passage.

But what I find so powerful about it is how it speaks to a particular moment in the life of God’s people – this moment when at long last, they are about to enter the Promised Land.

It’s been a time of incredible privation, stretching over a generation.

In fact, it’s been bad enough that at more than a few moments along the way, God’s people have even found themselves thinking about turning around and going back to into bondage as, perhaps, in the end, the easier option.

But that’s all behind them now.

At last, they have come to this moment, when the goodness of the Promised Land is stretched before them, and they’re like tourists off the bus, looking up at the skyscrapers of Manhattan for the very first time.

It is the moment they have all been waiting for.

And yet Moses, their leader, who knows them so well, recognizes that it is a moment that is full of danger as well as promise.

Because Moses sees that it’s the moment when the people may start forgetting God–forgetting the hard-won lessons they have learned about what it is to be faithful—forgetting that the powers and skills they command are not simply for their own flourishing, but for service to God, and neighbor, and even all Creation.

The line between blessing and temptation is a blurry one, and as God’s people enter this new land that they have been promised, Moses sees that are stepping right into that ambiguity.

And at this moment, as they stand before the grand vista of the Promised Land, he knows that he will not be with them—that his own journey will be ending there, on the far shore of freedom.

What happens now will be between them and God.

But a little bit later, he imagines some of the challenges of their coming life together, and he warns them, “You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:19).

What he means is, “remember.”

When you see the broken and the weary—remember.  When you see the hungry and the thirsty—remember. When you see the naked and the stranger—remember.

Because right up to this very moment of our standing here, looking at the Promised Land, that’s who we’ve been.

What makes us God’s people is not simply where we’ve ended up, but everything we have been through.

Whatever we are poised to become, we are only going to get there by remaining true to who it is that we have been.

That’s what Moses is saying.

We’ll come back to him in a moment.

First, let’s think about this morning’s Gospel, and how it comes at a similar moment in the life and ministry of Jesus.

With his own death not far away, and with his disciples in tow, hurrying along behind him, Jesus walks the streets of Jerusalem almost for the last time as a free man.

And so he tells them this story about the sheep and the goats, and he insists that it is how we care for the least among us that shows the true depth of our faith.

He imagines the last day, when the final trumpet sounds and the final roll is called, and he says,

“Then the king will say to those at his right hand,‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me” (Matthew 25:34-35).

To me, it’s a moment that bears a tremendous resemblance to that moment when Moses looked out with God’s people on the Promised Land…because in both cases, God’s people are being asked to remember.

With as much as we have, with all the promise that abides within each one of us, have we found ways to help others—to reach out—to serve the greater good, as God would so clearly have us do—or have we fallen short of those enduring expectations?

Because that is what it looks like to remember.

Last winter, maybe you saw the remarkable series of short video clips put out by a group raising awareness around homelessness.

In the videos, people from typical circumstances were asked to dress more or less along the lines of someone sleeping outdoors, and to sit on the street with a sign asking for change.

The twist was, the volunteers were placed outside the office or the apartment building or the gym where someone close to them—a parent, or a sister, or a close friend—would be certain to encounter them.

What happened was, of course, that there were some people who could look in the face of their own sister, thinly disguised, and have no moment of recognition, while there were others who saw the face of their beloved half a block away and came running.

Some of us look at the face of need, and the face of loneliness, the faces of confusion and brokenness and sickness, the faces of infirmity and immaturity…some of us look at those faces, and what they see in each one is not someone whom God has left behind, unblessed and unimportant.

They see the face of their beloved.

The faces of our grandmothers and grandfathers.

The face of Jesus.

That’s what it is to remember.

It’s not so much seeing our beloved and imagining them as an outcast.

As Moses and Jesus would have it, to remember is to see the outcast, and being able to see in them someone we might love. As someone already loved by God—and always loved by God—as our foremothers and forefathers so clearly were.

As we in our own moments of brokenness and loss so clearly were and are.

What makes us God’s people is not where it is that we end up, it’s what we’ve learned from everything that we’ve been through. How that has shaped who it is that we’ve become.

Will we remember what it is like to be on this long, great journey.

And what is abundance? Maybe it’s actually being able to see that. To remember that.

Because if you can see Jesus in the face of human need, if you can see the star of the story in any one of his many disguises, then you see God everywhere.

It is to remember who we are, and where we have come from, and to greet all people as fellow pilgrims.

This week, as we reckon with what it is to be thankful, and what it is to remember, may we recognize that the line between blessing and temptation remains blurry for us, too.

But this morning, Jesus promises us that as we live out our gratitude, remembering that God is the source of all good things, we will find God, and enter into God’s promises, not once, but over and over again.

We will see him standing on every corner, and see his love in every face, and we enter the Kingdom with joy and thanksgiving, remembering Him who always remembers us.

Now over twenty Augusts ago, I went to a wedding in Washington, DC – where both the bride and the groom were from.

Both families were DC power families, and everything about the wedding was carefully thought out and terrific, and very personal, even though there were about five hundred guests.

But the piece-de-resistance was the wedding cake.

Someone found out that a former White House pastry chef had been hired—I guess when you have that many guests, you need to bring in the big guns.

And it turned out that this chef would only work with butter from Normandy, I think because Norman butter has a higher fat content, and that was, apparently, this particular baker’s secret ingredient.

So, the butter had been flown in, and the cake had been baked, and there it was in the center of the tent on a warm August night in Washington, DC.

Maybe you know what a warm August night is like in Washington, DC.

You would think that, say, a former White House pastry chef would know what a warm August night is like in Washington, DC.

My table had a clear view of that cake.

And we began to see signs of trouble somewhere during Lamar Alexander’s kind but rather lengthy toast to the new couple.

“I think I just saw it sag,” said someone quietly.

And then the ground under the little marzipan bride began to give way, and before you knew it, there was a major cake-in – cave in – and a loud gasp, and suddenly, and army of servers appeared and the cake was whisked out of sight, to be plated inside.

I’m glad to tell you that the bride and groom and their parents were all just too happy about the day, and about the future, to be bothered by a mishap with the wedding cake, and the party went on without missing a beat.

But that doesn’t always happen at a wedding banquet does it?

Wedding banquets have become almost a subgenre within movies of all types, whether it’s “The Godfather” or “Wedding Crashers,” as moments replete with powerful dramatic undercurrents, and truths just waiting to be spoken in public.

In some sense, that’s true of this morning’s Scripture, too – this parable Jesus tells about a king who gives a wedding banquet for his son.

The last line is the one everybody knows. The king says, “For many are called, but few are chosen.”

For surprisingly enough, a royal invitation did not turn out the A-list crowd that the king had been anticipating.

I read a couple of weeks ago that Ralph Lauren was absolutely beyond furious when Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, declined an invitation to sit in the front row at a fashion show he had been planning for months, and for which he had made a generous donation to one of Prince William’s charities.

Prince William dutifully came to the show and was warm and polite…and unfortunately, entirely beside the point…because who cares about him?

Maybe it was like that for the king in Jesus’ parable.

Having the A-listers come to his son’s wedding banquet would have been fun, but having them reject it was humiliating, and he lashes out.

It’s a strange moment for us as listeners, of course, because we’re used to hearing Jesus talk about welcoming the unwelcome as an expression of kindness and compassion, as heeding a call to be part of a broader community.

This does not seem to be saying that.

And along those lines, it’s curious that after being rejected by the A-listers, the king would bother to be furious with some hapless, regular joe of a guest who isn’t dressed up for the affair.

Clearly, his heart and mind have not been somehow enlarged by this experience.

It makes you wonder: what is supposed to be spiritual here?

To me, the whole story is a strange meditation on what it is to be chosen.

I wonder if the person Jesus wants us to pay attention to is, actually, the king.

Because, it’s the king chooses one guest list, and then another.

But it’s also the king who chooses to use his power impulsively and destructively.

By anyone’s judgment, to be a king is to be one of the few who has been chosen.

What could be more blessed than having a kingdom of your own?

And yet…look at what he does with it.

The son, the court, the kingdom scarcely enter into the story—the king has become entirely wrapped up in himself.

Similarly, the danger for us isn’t found in wearing the wrong clothes to the banquet.  The danger lies in our capacity to become tyrants–people who use our power to keep control over our particular kingdom, rather than using it to reach out, and to do good. 

And so our Gospel names for me today, first, the great danger of all the ways in which we are chosen—the ways in which we are blessed.

It calls us to be honest with ourselves about the power we have to make a difference in the world, for good or for ill.

I suspect that many of us want to rewrite this parable, and to imagine the king transformed by the banquet, where he can see at close range what it is to be generous to those in need—and maybe find new purpose in that.

Isn’t that how it should be?

Because it’s so easy to say that about someone else’s story–that it needs to be rewritten, that it’s time to begin a new chapter, and all that.  It’s so easy to say that about someone else’s story, and so hard to say about our own.

And that is the second thing the Gospel names for me today.

It makes me wonder about what parts of my story, and my influence are aching to be rewritten.

I suspect each of us gets a slightly different sense of that, if we try to go there.

Is the point really our story, after all? Because I think the larger point is how our stories are folded into the larger story of everything God has done and is doing–the story of God’s endlessly creative, relentlessly adaptive, and hopelessly devoted love for all that He has made.

Bearing that in mind, how do you and I understand the parts of our lives which are not simply our own doing, but which might just be signs of our being chosen? And what do we do with the powers that we have?

Is it enough?

Or are we called to rewrite the story in some more faithful way?

I have a lot of conversations about what living in Greenwich means to people, and for some, it is a place they are eager to help if they can just find the right way; while for others, it is the place they come home to in order to get patched up before the next round, and they feel lucky if they manage to keep their lawn alive through August.

Figuring out what to do with our chosenness is challenging. But we are called to figure it out — and to figure it out soon.

Because make no mistake: your life and mine can be like that wedding cake, made of the very finest ingredients and prepared for the most elegant of occasions, only to prove far too fragile when the circumstances change.

Few are chosen to begin with. And even fewer make their chosenness into a path that honors God and neighbor, and enlarges the world’s humanity.

This morning, Jesus reminds us to be among those who do.

Because then, no matter how you slice it, our lives will be sweet, indeed.

Amen.