Be a Blessing

A Meditation from Southminster Presbyterian Church
Luke 2:22-40

Our reading this morning from Luke’s gospel picks up right after our Christmas Eve story. Mary and Joseph have presumably returned from Bethlehem to Nazareth, and then when the baby was 8 days old, they named him Jesus as they had been instructed by the angel and they had him circumcised. Then when he was only 40 days old, they load up the mini van and head on down to Jerusalem. Like all observant Jewish families of the day, they presented themselves at the Temple for purification., and they offered a sacrifice of 2 turtle doves.
I read this story in Luke and wonder if the 2 turtle doves in the 12 Days of Christmas come from this passage. Surely they must.

But Luke’s original audience would have wondered something else. “Turtle doves? Why didn’t they sacrifice a lamb?”
Here are the directions in Leviticus 12:6-8: “When the days of her purification are completed, she shall bring to the priest at the entrance of the tent of meeting a lamb in its first year for a burnt offering and a pigeon or a turtledove for a sin offering. The priest shall offer it before the Lord and make atonement on her behalf…If she cannot afford a sheep, she shall take two turtledoves or two pigeons, one for a burnt offering and the other for the sin offering…”
So without saying “Mary and Joseph were very poor”, Luke lets the readers know that by offering two turtle doves instead of a lamb and a turtle dove, Mary and Joseph were very poor.
There are preachers who will tell you that if you have faith, you will be financially prosperous. They have found a few verses in Scripture that support this “prosperity gospel” and it appears to be making these preachers prosperous, at least.

Our culture wants this prosperity gospel to be true, because the American dream is not built on finding the blessings in poverty. But you will not hear a prosperity gospel from me. Because if Joseph and Mary had faith enough to listen to the angel, to bring God’s own son into the world, and to be obedient enough to take him to the Temple to obey the Laws of Moses, then they should have been prosperous beyond measure. Yet this couple couldn’t even afford to buy a lamb for the sacrifice. So any claims that faith will make you rich, any “prosperity gospel”, is nonsense. Because if God’s own family was apparently struggling to get by, then we need to reconsider the connection between being blessed and being prosperous.
Americans often use those words as synonyms. We should resist that inclination. Because Joseph and Mary are about as blessed as you can be. Literally.

Simeon, about whom we only know what Luke tells us, has been led by the Spirit to the Temple. He had been waiting for the consolation of Israel.
What an odd scene it must have been at the Temple. This old man standing at the doors, watching people going in and out…. “Is it them? No. What about that baby over there? No. Excuse me, ma’am, can I take a look at your child? Never mind, I mistook you for someone else.”
When Mary and Joseph walk in the doors of the temple, the Spirit helps Simeon know he’s found the right family, despite the two turtle doves in Joseph’s hands, and Simeon takes the baby Jesus and blesses him. “Lord, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your Word. For my eyes have seen your salvation which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples—a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel.”

Yes, any connection between being blessed and being prosperous are hard to see in this text.

I wish I had been at the Temple myself that day, or was at least able to ask Luke to give us some more details. Because here’s what I want to know. What did Simeon do after he had spoken his blessing? After he realized that the family of God’s own son was in financial need. Did he do something more for the family than SPEAK a blessing? Did he do anything to BE a blessing for them? Did he take them to a Subway restaurant to make sure they had dinner before they headed back to Nazareth?
I trust that anyone who was led by the Spirit as Simeon was would have done something to alleviate their immediate hardship. But Luke doesn’t give us those details. So we have to figure out how to be blessings on our own. We also have to figure out how to separate blessing from financial prosperity.
Here is an illustration of a Simeon like blessing from a football game
in Grapevine, Texas. It was Grapevine Faith vs. Gainesville State School, as told by Rick Reilly at ESPN.com.

“This all started when Faith's head coach, Kris Hogan, wanted to do something kind for the Gainesville team. Faith had never played Gainesville, but he already knew the score. After all, Faith was 7-2 going into the game, Gainesville 0-8 with 2 TDs all year. Faith has 70 kids, 11 coaches, the latest equipment and involved parents. Gainesville has a lot of kids with convictions for drugs, assault and robbery—many of whose families had disowned them—wearing seven-year-old shoulder pads and ancient helmets. Gainesville State is a maximum-security correctional facility 75 miles north of Dallas. Every game it plays is on the road.
So Hogan had this idea. What if half of our fans—for one night only—cheered for the other team? He sent out an email asking the Faithful to do just that. "Here's the message I want you to send:" Hogan wrote. "You are just as valuable as any other person on planet Earth."
Some people were naturally confused. One Faith player walked into Hogan's office and asked, "Coach, why are we doing this?"
And Hogan said, "Imagine if you didn't have a home life. Imagine if everybody had pretty much given up on you. Now imagine what it would mean for hundreds of people to suddenly believe in you."
Next thing you know, the Gainesville Tornadoes were turning around on their bench to see something they never had before. Hundreds of fans. And actual cheerleaders!
More than 200 Faith fans sat on the Gainesville side and kept cheering the Gainesville players on—by name.
And even though Faith walloped them 33-14, the Gainesville kids were so happy that after the game they gave head coach Mark Williams a sideline squirt-bottle shower like he'd just won state.
It was a strange experience for boys who most people cross the street to avoid. "We can tell people are a little afraid of us when we come to the games," says Gerald, a lineman who will wind up doing more than three years. "You can see it in their eyes. They're lookin' at us like we're criminals. But these people, they were yellin' for us! By our names!"
After the game, both teams gathered in the middle of the field to pray and that's when a kid named Isaiah surprised everybody by asking to lead. "We had no idea what the kid was going to say," remembers Coach Hogan. But Isaiah said this: "Lord, I don't know how this happened, so I don't know how to say thank You, but I never would've known there was so many people in the world that cared about us."
As the Tornadoes walked back to their bus under guard, they each were handed a bag for the ride home—a burger, some fries, a soda, some candy, a Bible and an encouraging letter from a Faith player.
The Gainesville coach saw Hogan, grabbed him hard by the shoulders and said, "You'll never know what your people did for these kids tonight. You'll never, ever know."
And as the bus pulled away, all the Gainesville players crammed to one side and pressed their hands to the window, staring at these people they'd never met before, watching their waves and smiles disappearing into the night.”

That, my friends, is an illustration of being a blessing, of showing that every child you meet is a gift, not just the child who was born in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago. Perhaps if we want our Advent waiting to pay off, we should, like Simeon and like that football coach in Texas, start blessing all of the children that the Spirit puts in our lives.
Amen.

See For Yourself

Christmas Eve Sermon
2008 Southminster Presbyterian Church
Luke 2:1-20

I don’t know about you, but for me, this text from Luke takes me back home—warm, comfortable feelings of love, family and that odd Norwegian dish my mom would occasionally subject us to on Christmas Eve. 40 consecutive Christmas Eves and Handel’s Messiah have done their job and etched these texts from Luke’s across my memory as few other texts are. “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus….”

But this text is not really about comfortable feelings or going home for the holidays. While Joseph may have been returning to the home of his ancestors, they didn’t seem to know anyone there—or wouldn’t they have had better accommodations?
This text is about going away for the holidays. It is dislocating. It is 8 hours stuck at the Seattle airport. People are leaving their homes and lives, going to uncomfortable and unfamiliar locations. From Mary and Joseph to the Shepherds, people are being sent into unknown futures in this passage.

For Palestinians in the first century, or for Palestinians today—for that matter, decrees from the Emperor were not good news. This census is about taxation and Joseph and Mary have to inconvenience themselves at a rather important moment in their lives so that the occupying Roman authorities will be able to properly tax them. Insult to injury. And the trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem is long and dusty. A change of climate and geography. Not exactly how I would choose to prepare for the birth of my first born.

It does make me wonder, though. As 9 month pregnant Mary was trying to stay comfortable while riding a donkey over the Judean hills, did she wonder about the angel’s pronouncement that heralded the beginning of her pregnancy 9 months earlier? Did it occur to her that it must have been some sort of dream? Because even if you can get your mind around the fact that you, a teenager from Nazareth, are going to become the mother of God, don’t you think you’d start wondering when the perks that came with the job were going to arrive? Certainly the indignity of cross country travel and giving birth in a barn were not what she thought would go along with being the mother of God. This just shows why God never chose me to be the Christ bearer. I would have demanded a limo. None of this donkey nonsense for me.

But I suspect that the dislocation to Bethlehem as I were about to give birth would make me pause and wonder—this is how the mother of God is treated? Really?

And then, after she’s wrapped her baby in cloths she’s pulled out of her suitcase, and tries to make herself as comfortable as you can be in a barn, they receive company! Just what every woman wants right after she’s given birth—shepherds!

So, as much as we try to make Christmas about comfortable traditions and familiar surroundings, Mary and Joseph didn’t know about that tradition. They were dislocated and far away from anything they knew when God came to them.

And I hope that those of you who are feeling dislocated these days, whether because of situations in your personal life or from the general state of our economy and the world, I hope that you will note that God left the realm of the invisible and became flesh in the midst of dislocation. It is when we are not comfortable, when we don’t know where we are, that we see God.

And the poor shepherds. Think how awkward and dislocating it must have been for them. These shepherds had been minding their own business in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night, when they had the wits scared out of them. They weren’t just visited by an angel, but then the glory of the Lord shone around them too. But the angel says what angels always seem to have to say, “Do not fear”. And so these shepherds pull themselves together to listen to the angel’s news. And after the angel makes the pronouncement of what they will find in the city of David, a multitude of the heavenly host shows up singing. Not an average night on the mountain side, we can safely guess.

We should give the shepherds some credit here. Because rather than sitting around the campfire and making a pact that the crazy things they had just seen would never leave the campfire—what happens in Bethlehem stays in Bethlehem, as it were—they decide to go see for themselves.

Sensible plan. You get there and there’s no baby, you consider it a bad dream and go back to tending sheep. But, if you get there to see for yourself, and the angel was right, then you are in possession of some important news.

“I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people. To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”

And that is some radical news. Don’t let the radical and shocking nature of this pronouncement get lost in your possible familiarity with the text.

The angel came to shepherds. It isn’t often, it isn’t EVER, that shepherds are the good news bearers in ancient society. The angel could have appeared at the country club. Or at the Temple. Or at the capital building. Or in Hollywood. But the angel and the heavenly host did not go to the halls of power or influence. They went to people with no voice. People who were more comfortable with livestock than with humans become the bearers of the good news.

And this news, the shepherds realized, was too important to remain in Bethlehem.
Because this good news wasn’t just for the people who already had the monopoly on good news. This was good news for all people.

So the shepherds go to see for themselves—because if the angel was right then we no longer need to buy into the culture that tells us that good news is only for those who can buy it or control it or commodify it.

The good news is for all people.


So, Mary’s resting in the stable when in walk the shepherds. These shepherds look like they have just seen a ghost. Or perhaps an entire multitude of them. They silently walk into the barn, as if they’re afraid of what they’ll find there. And then, when they see the new family, gathered around the feeding trough that holds a baby, they all start talking at once.
“The angel was right.”
“Here he is!”
“Wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger—just like the angel said!”
Mary and Joseph can hardly understand them as they try to distinguish which words belong to which voice.

But as “seeing was believing” for the shepherds, I suspect that was true for Mary and Joseph too. Because when they were able to piece together the shepherds’ story—angel, heavenly host, Messiah, Savior, Glory to God in the highest heaven, etc—it must have been a confirmation of their experience for them as well. As Mary treasured their words and pondered them in her heart, was she thinking, “This may not have happened as we would have scripted, but at least we’re not alone in this. These shepherds have seen the angel too. But shepherds? Really?”

Perhaps she looked at her son, asleep in the hay, and began to wonder if he wasn’t someone she was really going to get to know as much as someone she would spend a long time pondering.

So, the angel has come to us this night as well—unlikely bearers of good news as we may be—and we are invited to go see for ourselves. We are invited to leave our hillsides of comfort and routine and go see for ourselves. I don’t know where that might take you, but you are the bearers of good news to a world that is desperately in need of it. “I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people. To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” Amen.

Rick Warren and the Inauguration

Many of you have heard that President elect Obama has invited Rick Warren, pastor of the conservative Saddleback Church of California, to pray at the inauguration. Now, I do not agree with Pastor Warren on much, I suspect. We approach our faith from very different places. And I completely disagree with him on his support for Proposition 8 in California.
I think it is unfortunate when Christ's message of radical and inclusive love is co-opted to support narrow minded and bigoted legislation and policies.
But, let me be one of the few (or perhaps only) progressive Christian to speak out in favor of Obama's selection of Warren as a participant in the inauguration.

I have been very unhappy the past 8 years in our political world. At no point have I felt that my views were heard, respected, or in any way important to the president or his appointees. Under Bush, (and Clinton before him, quite frankly), all we have heard from Washington are voices proclaiming the party line. We have turned our political arena into a "winner takes all" place. You can win an election with 50% of the vote, and once you are in office, the other 50% of the population has lost their voice for the next four years.

So, while I don't agree with much that Rick Warren has to say, I do applaud President elect Obama's decision to give him voice. We all, conservative and liberal alike, need to get back into the habit of listening to other voices. We need to drop the "winner takes all" attitude and realize that we only win when we respect and hear each other.

I also recognize that it might be easier for me to make this claim than it might be for any of my GLBT friends. I recognize that there are many people who are hurt because Rev Warren's voice is speaking against them.

I hope the President elect will also invite more progressive Christian voices to join in his inauguration as well.

But we all have to hope that by modeling government that allows voices to be heard, we can live into hope.

How can this be. Indeed.

Luke 1:26-55

A Sermon preached at Southminster Presbyterian Church
December 14, 2008
by Marci Auld Glass

There are times when we can jump into the biblical text without much trouble. We can relate to the characters or we understand their lives. But for most of us, I suspect that, even if we want to, we have a hard time putting ourselves in Mary’s shoes. Artists have tried.


Often when artists paint Mary, she’s serene looking. She’s got it all together. She’s in her 20s or 30s. She’s the kind of “Mother of the Year” to whom you would give the son of God.
Here is a painting by Fra Angelica.








Here is one by El Greco.


And here is one from a 16th century Icon at St Catherine’s Monastery at Mt Sinai in Egypt.



But Mary, in all likelihood, was still a teenager. Girls married very young at a time when the life expectancy was 40.
Unplanned, unwed teenage pregnancies, as difficult as they are today, would have been more than devastating for Mary in her culture. And, quite frankly, it doesn’t matter that the pregnancy is God’s—because while the angel told her that she was blessed and that she shouldn’t be afraid, the angel did not take out an ad in the Jerusalem Times to make sure that everyone else knew that.
“How can this be?”, she asks the angel.
How can this be, indeed.

I can only imagine what was going through her head when the angel showed up. “Greetings, favored one!”
“Who? Me? Favored by whom?” Can’t you just see Mary looking around, trying to figure out to whom the angel would be speaking in this dusty town of Nazareth.
Favored one? I don’t know how many years it has been since you were a teenage girl or might have known many teenage girls, but I suspect that “favored one” is not how they often see themselves. I certainly didn’t. I spent my entire teenage years wishing I were someone else, or had someone else’s car, clothes, hair, social life, personality, you name it. Hindsight is, of course, 20/20, but Mary wasn’t looking back at that moment either. There she was, in all of her adolescent glory, being told that the Lord was with her and that she was going to give birth to God’s own son who was going to reign over the house of Jacob forever.

Look at this painting of Mary, painted by Dante Rosetti in 1850, as she hears the news. She looks young here. And she looks scared.


And I have one last image of Mary for you today. This annunciation is painted by John Collier. It is one of my favorite paintings.

Here she is in front of her suburban home, wearing her saddle shoes, with her hair in a ponytail.
“Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you!”

What are the implications for us if God chose an unwed teenage girl to bear the son of God?
One that occurs to me is that here is our proof that God is willing to be vulnerable. Because Mary was vulnerable. There was a more than decent chance that this pregnancy could have resulted in Mary being stoned to death. God does not just have a preference for the poor and the weak. God became poor and weak. God came to earth and joined a family, entering into the struggles, the fears, the anxieties, the joys, the celebrations, and the gifts that go along with being family.

Another implication is that when we look around for God’s in-breaking into our world, where are we looking? Because I’m fairly confident that nobody in Israel 2,000 years ago was looking for the Messiah to come from a young mother in Nazareth. Many were looking for the Messiah to come in glory on the clouds with the heavenly host. Others were expecting a new King to be raised up from the people, leading a restored Israel to military might. So, if they were looking in the temple, looking at the White House, or looking at West Point, they missed their Messiah.
Where are we looking?

Mary seemed to have realized some of the implications in her own life. “Here am I, the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word.” She realizes she is a part of something bigger than herself. She realizes that ultimately, our lives are in God’s hands and not ours. “Let it be with me, according to your word.”

Then Mary set off “with haste” to her relative Elizabeth’s home. Elizabeth’s story is earlier in the chapter, but she is one of many women in the scriptures who was barren and who is granted a child by the Lord. She was “getting on in years” and her barrenness had caused her shame, so her pregnancy was a gift. And, apparently, Mary decides that the best way for her to appreciate and put her unplanned pregnancy into perspective is to go spend time with her barren relative. Because sometimes it takes someone else’s situation to put your own troubles in perspective.

As soon as Elizabeth hears Mary’s voice she proclaims, “blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”
I can imagine, at that point, hearing a real, live person give validation to the words of the Angel must have caused Mary to collapse in a heap of relief. “I’m not crazy. I didn’t make it up. Elizabeth knows it too.”

Please note that Mary did not go off by herself when she heard the news from the angel. She went to a woman who’d been there. She found community with another woman affected by society’s tendency to judge women on their fertility, or their lack thereof. When things are tough, that’s what we do. Share our stories with others to help them navigate the difficult paths. And, we share our stories so we can help each other see where we see the Divine at work in each other’s lives.

This is something I would really like to move us all into doing. The more of your stories I learn, the more connections I see. The more of your stories I hear, the more intersections I see between this place and God’s work in the world. And that is the piece for us to work at. When we read scripture (which implies, of course, that we are reading scripture), where do we see our lives in the text? What connections do we make? How do we tell our stories to lead people to God’s stories?
Elizabeth does this. Her story becomes a way for Mary to know that she wasn’t crazy, to know that God was working in her life.

And then we get the Magnificat. This song of Mary reminds us of other songs by other women in scripture. Hannah at the temple after the birth of Samuel. Miriam after the defeat of the Egyptians at the Red Sea. The song begins with praise for blessings received. Even in the midst of an unplanned pregnancy, Mary searches for her blessings.

But then she goes on to make claims about God. And the claims she makes suggests to me that she realizes there are implications for more than her when God comes to earth as the child of a teenage girl from Nazareth. “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.”

We should note that, as far as we can tell in either the text or in our world, Mary is speaking of things that haven’t quite happened yet. Powerful people still seem to be on their thrones. The lowly still seem to be low. The hungry are still going to the foodbanks and, despite the worsening economy, the rich are not quite empty. We are reminded by her words that Advent is a time of preparing both for the birth of Christ and for his return. The blessings of which she speaks are a consequence of God’s New Creation, begun in the life of Jesus. But it is to the return of Jesus that we must look to see their completion.

As Christians, we are a people of hope. Hope that the promises God made to Israel have been fulfilled in Christ’s birth and will be fulfilled in Christ’s return. So, we live in hope that our work together as God’s people will make Mary’s song true for the people in our community.
We live in confidence because God chose to make his home far from the halls of power. If God’s story can intersect in the life of a teenage girl in Nazareth, we live in hope and confidence that God’s story will intersect in our lives too. We continue to wait in Advent in hope, confidence and excitement about how the Divine will enter into our lives. Thanks be to God. Amen

Prepare the Way

A Sermon Preached at Southminster Presbyterian
Dec 7, 2008

Isaiah 40:1-11
Mark 1:1-8


I know that many of you have put up your Christmas tree (or 3) already. For some of you, the lights are hanging from the eaves and your house is ready to go for the holidays. Each day I see more and more houses in my neighborhood getting into the Christmas spirit. Some have giant polar bears or penguins. Others have animatronic reindeer. There are lots of Santa Claus’s too. Occasionally you see manger scenes, backlit with icicle lights—little baby Jesus asleep in the weatherproof plastic hay.
But I have yet to see, and I doubt I ever will, a John the Baptizer Christmas decoration.
What would that look like? A wild man with a camel pelt on his back, cinched together with a leather strap. His beard would be a mess, because there is no way to eat wild honey and locusts neatly.
In other words, he might scare the children.
In paintings, none of which I have the rights to publish on my blog, John the Baptist is portrayed in some standard ways.
In a painting by Matthias Grunewald, John is at the crucifixion of Jesus, even though John had already been beheaded by the time of Jesus’ death. This painting was a favorite of the theologian Karl Barth. He had it hanging in his study. What Barth is said to have liked about it is that John the Baptist is pointing at Jesus. It is a common way for him to be portrayed—long bony finger pointing to Christ. John is also often portrayed with a lamb, because in John’s Gospel, he proclaimed Jesus as the “Lamb of God, come to take away the sins of the world.”
In other images, John is portrayed with his own head alongside him. Herod had beheaded John, and so the theme of martyrdom, of his dying because of his willingness to speak unpopular truth to power, is portrayed here, with his severed head.
And John is often portrayed with angel wings. Because the Greek word for “messenger” is the word from which we get the word “angel”.

In any case, none of the images I found would make attractive lawn ornaments.
And yet, even as we ignore John the Baptist as we decorate our homes at the holidays, we can’t deny the role he plays in this story.
The author of Mark, apparently uninterested in our penchant for decorating our lawns with angels and wise men, does not begin Jesus’ story with any sort of birth narrative. We can’t tell if he doesn’t know the birth stories or if he doesn’t care about them, but Mark begins with John the Baptizer, preparing the way by preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin.

Interestingly, according to the non-christian historical record of the day, John the Baptizer was a better known figure than Jesus. There were plenty of people at the time who thought Jesus would become a historical footnote and John would be the one we’d be talking about years down the road. Because John had followers. Lots of them in his lifetime. All of the people of Jerusalem were leaving the city and heading to the river bank to be baptized by him. By all accounts, he was charismatic. He was troublesome. He was martyred.
And while each of the gospel writers tell the story of Jesus in their own way, ALL of them connect Jesus with John the Baptist.
Mark cites the Isaiah passage we heard read earlier this morning as we lit the advent candles—prepare ye the way of the Lord. He also throws in a little bit of the prophet Malachi, from 3:1, “See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple.” And if equating John the Baptist with the fulfillment of two prophets wasn’t enough, Mark calls attention to the fact that John dressed just like Elijah.
John the Baptist is not just a charismatic speaker who drew unimaginable crowds out into the wilderness to be baptized, but is also the fulfillment of Isaiah and Malachi’s prophecy and a doppelganger, or twin, for Elijah.

But Mark and the other gospel writers also want to make sure that we know how Jesus and John relate to each other. John tells the crowds—“The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.” John may have drawn the big crowds, but was just the preparer.

Preparer. Isn’t it interesting that God needs a preparer? John claimed to be there, preparing the way for Jesus. And in Isaiah, the people are told to prepare the way of the Lord. But how often do we consider that God requires someone to prepare the way?
And what is involved in preparing?
If I’m preparing for a dinner party, for example, the task is pretty simple. I buy the groceries, make the dishes, clean the house—crossing things off of a list that I have made. Preparing for an event you have scheduled is easy—you are in control, you make the list, you schedule the event so you know when it will all take place.
Preparing the way when you aren’t in charge is much trickier.
What if I’m preparing for a dinner party that could happen anytime in February? And what if the party could be anywhere from 2 people to 20 people? How do you prepare for that?

Preparing for others is often difficult because you often don’t know how it will turn out. Rosa Parks sat down on a bus because she was tired of being treated as less than human. She intentionally stayed in her seat on that bus to prepare the way. And her act of defiance that was a key moment in the Civil Rights Movement.
But she didn’t know that then. She ended up losing her job as a seamstress because of the publicity around her arrest. Were there times when she wondered if preparing the way was worth the risk? While equal rights for all Americans is a dream not yet realized, I wonder what Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. and all of the other men and women who marched and protested and prayed for equality would have thought last month on election night, when Barack Obama was elected to the Presidency. Could they see that outcome as they prepared the way?
We just finished our Stewardship Campaign—it’s never too late to pledge, by the way—and Stewardship is another illustration of preparing a way when you don’t know the outcome. When you turned in your pledge card, and when you pay your pledge each month, you trust that God will combine your gifts with the gifts of others so that we can go about the work of the church. But you don’t get to specify that you want your money to go to Mission for example, leaving someone else to pay the utility bill. In pledging, you agree to give up some control and hand it over to God, trusting that the Session will be led by the Holy Spirit to make the best decisions about budgeting. Stewardship is preparing the Way for God’s work to be done here in Boise.

And there are times you prepare the way and you don’t even know you’re doing it. I think about the women who came before me in ministry—they certainly didn’t seek ordination 60 years ago so that in 2008 I could become your pastor. When they were fighting for the right to become elders, and then pastors, they were just answering God’s call in their lives. Yet, their struggles, their ministries through the channels that were open to them--Women’s circles, Sunday School, etc— their compromises, their ordination as elder, their ordination as minister of word and sacrament—all of their work prepared the way for me and the other women now being ordained.
And struggles for inclusion in the church and in society are still taking place today. Gay and lesbian Christians are still having to struggle for inclusion in the church—are their struggles today preparing the way for people still to come?

Preparing the way. We’re all called to do it. But not in the easy way. We don’t get to set this schedule or coordinate the details for this preparation. This isn’t our show to run. We don’t know what the outcome will be. And we don’t even know who all will walk down the road we are preparing.
We are called to prepare for God. On God’s timetable. For God’s glory to be revealed.
Open your bibles, if you will, to Isaiah, chapter 40.
From chapters 40 to 55, there is a very different tone than the earlier chapters of Isaiah’s writings. This is the book of consolation—where the people are comforted in the midst of their exile and devastation.
“Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid….”
But a part of the consolation is the preparation. In the wilderness, we are told, prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God. This work we’re being called to is so that the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and ALL people shall see it TOGETHER.
Isaiah is calling the people to work together for all people. But when the voice says, “cry out!”, the people have no better sense about what they are to do to prepare than we do. “What shall I cry?”, they ask.
We are told to get up to a high mountain and lift up our voices with strength. This is not something for which we should have fear either.
“HERE IS YOUR GOD!”
That is what we are to point out to people. We are to boldly and with confidence stand on the mountain tops and show people where we have seen God. Isn’t that what John the Baptizer does, with that finger pointing to Christ—here is where I see God. Remember when we saw that picture of John with wings and I told you that “angel” and “messenger” come from the same word? The word is “angelos”. Angel. Messenger.
Another word that comes from the same root is euangelion. And it means good message, or more commonly, Good News. The word euangelion comes into English as Evangelism. Evangelism is, literally, the sharing of Good News.

Yesterday was Meet the Neighbors day. I know that many of you were busy with other projects yesterday, but I want to thank those of you who did show up. Bruce Walters, Randy and Cheryl Marshall, Rich and Julie Anderson, Kay Hamilton, Carrie Lillard, and Carolyn Blackhurst. It was fun. We passed out letters in the neighborhood, inviting people to join us. There are copies of the letter in the narthex if you would like to see what it said or if you would like to take a letter to share with a friend.
But what I saw clearly yesterday was that evangelism scares people. I invite you to speak with someone who went door to door yesterday. Some of them were a little hesitant, or perhaps terrified, to knock on a door. Yet they did it. And it was fun. But evangelism didn’t just scare the evangelizers. It scared the people who opened the door. People were often very leery as they opened the door. But when they realized that we weren’t trying to sell them something and we weren’t trying to convert them or judge them, many of them visibly relaxed. Will people show up in worship because of what we did? I don’t know. But that wasn’t our job. Isaiah says that we’re just to get up on the mountain and tell people—“here is your God!”. We’ll leave what happens next to God. We are just the preparers, after all.
But how did sharing the Good News turn into something that scares us?

I’m thankful to hear that voice in Isaiah telling us to lift up our voices without fear. And I hope that as we struggle together to figure out what it means to prepare the way for God, I hope that we’ll be able to go about it with more love and less fear. I hope, like Isaiah, we can say to the cities of Judah (and Boise)—“Here is your God!”. Because if “evangelism” really means pointing out to people when and where we see the Divine at work in our world—then we do, indeed have Good News to share. Prepare the way!