The Mouth of the Prophet

By Rev. Gusti Linnea Newquist

Deuteronomy 18: 15-19

Luke 4: 16-30

We were riveted last Sunday, were we not? It was truly a “Healing Sabbath.”

For those of you who were not here, our guest preacher, who is a leader in the Presbyterian marriage equality movement, invited the highest court of the church to stretch out a withered and weary hand on behalf of a denomination that has been disfigured by discrimination for far too long, to soak up the healing touch of the Jesus who wants us all to be well, and to declare once and for all that church law can no longer be used to bind the conscience of pastors in performing the marriages of all couples who seek our pastoral care.

We were riveted. And we applauded. And we came together as one body of Christ to pray the deepest prayer we knew how to pray: that God will give Rev. Clark the mouth of a prophet in challenging the court to make our denomination whole. And that they will listen! And pay attention! And respond! Because God is surely holding us all accountable to “the words that the prophet shall speak” in God’s name through Scott Clark.

I don’t know about you, but I am still praying the prayer we began last week. Still riveted by the prophetic word that was preached from this pulpit. Still touched to the core by the Spirit of God who was so emphatically with us last week that we really could touch her as we touched each other in our laying on of hands. For Scott. For our elders and deacons. And if we are honest, for ourselves.

And yet . . .

As I read the New Testament Lesson from the Gospel of Luke this morning, I cannot help but compare us with that 1st century congregation in Nazareth eagerly awaiting the proclamation of Jesus. And I get a little bit afraid of what could happen next if we don’t pay careful attention to the full scope of the gospel as it is presented to us in this text. You see, the congregation gathering around Jesus in this 1st century congregation in Nazareth is just as enthusiastic about their anointed hero as we are about ours. Word has trickled home to them of the amazing healing ministry of Jesus throughout Galilee. Praise for his prophetic message in pulpits throughout the country has resounded.

They have welcomed him home as “one of their own,” and they are thrilled with his preaching and his teaching and his pastoral care. Just like we are thrilled with the preaching and teaching and pastoral care of Janie Spahr, Scott Clark, and Sara Taylor, who were our guests last weekend.

But then the other shoe drops. And the congregation that has touched the very Spirit of God in anointing Jesus ends up rising in such rage that Jesus fears for his very life when they lead him to the edge of the hill on which their town is built and threaten to hurl him off the cliff.

What in God’s name—literally—has gone wrong!?

The people of Nazareth are truly oppressed. They are, for all practical purposes, colonized by a foreign power. They still bear the deep scars of a bloody revolt they waged against Rome twenty years earlier. Rome decisively and devastatingly crushed them. And, in many ways, crushes them still. Their economic system has been co-opted by Rome. Their movements are monitored by Rome. Their physical wounds from the revolt—including forced blindness—have been inflicted by Rome. Their entire way of life is subject to the whim of Rome.

So when the 1st century congregation in Nazareth hears Jesus say that the Spirit of God has anointed him to “bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and liberty to the oppressed,” they automatically assume Jesus is speaking about them. They are the ones who are poor, are they not? They are the ones who are captive, blind, oppressed. Surely Jesus is speaking about them? And he is! And yet he is not.

Don’t forget, Jesus reminds his congregation, that the gospel is universal. It always has been and it always will be. The great prophet Elijah, himself, Jesus reminds them, left his own people high and dry in the middle of a famine to offer food and comfort to a foreign widow. And of course everyone who is listening will automatically link the foreign widow of Elijah’s day with the Roman Gentiles of their day. Is Jesus saying God cares more about them than God does about us?! That’s downright offensive!

But that’s not all.

Don’t forget, Jesus reminds his congregation, that the gospel is universal. It always has been and it always will be. The great prophet Elisha, himself, Jesus reminds them, healed a soldier of Syria—and not any of his own people—from the dreaded disease of leprosy. And of course everyone who is listening will automatically link the healing of a hated soldier from the Syria of Elisha’s day with the healing of a hated soldier from the Rome of their day. Is Jesus saying God cares more about a Roman soldier than God cares about us?! That’s not just offensive. That’s intolerable!

It is also true.

The Roman Gentile widow, Jesus is saying to the truly oppressed 1st century congregation in Nazareth, may be just as poor as you are. And perhaps poorer. Pay attention! Listen! Respond! God cares about her, too! The conscripted Roman soldier, Jesus is saying to the truly oppressed 1st century congregation in Nazareth, may be just as captive as you are. Pay attention! Listen! Respond! God cares about him, too! The good news of God, Jesus says to the truly oppressed 1st century congregation in Nazareth, is that the liberation of the whole human family is bound up together if we are truly willing to see with God’s eyes and not our own. Listen! Pay attention! Respond! The mouth of the prophet is speaking!

We who live in this 21st century congregation where we, too, have been riveted by the proclamation of good news through the prophetic witness of those who are advocating justice in marriage equality—an issue of social justice that directly affects us—that directly affects us!—encounter a crucial reminder in our gospel lesson for today. The “Healing Sabbath” that Rev. Clark proclaimed last week is—yes—emphatically about us. It is. 100%.

And yet is about far more than us. What Jesus calls “good news to the poor” is in modern Christian ethics is something like a clarion call for economic justice, and it really is for everyone and not just ourselves. What Jesus calls “release to the captives” is in modern Christian ethics something like a clarion call for civil or human rights at every level, and it really is for everyone and not just ourselves. What Jesus calls “recovery of sight to the blind” is in modern Christian ethics something like—dare I say it?—a clarion call for healthcare reform, and it really is for everyone and not just ourselves. We may disagree on the best ways to implement these clarion calls. But they are the heart of the gospel, even if they sound—horror!—“too political.”

What Jesus calls “liberty to the oppressed” is in modern Christian ethics something like a call for every one of us to take a good hard look in the mirror and repent of the ways in which we, too, have given ourselves over to the values of empire, of the ways in which we succumb to the claim God is for us and for our needs alone, of the ways in which we place our own freedom in opposition to the freedom of others. It is a call to say we want to live differently. Starting right here. Starting right now. Because “today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

The good news for Madison Square is that I think we already know this. This congregation has a long history of mission and advocacy for all of God’s children, and that history will guide this community well into the future. There is no need to rise up in rage against the prophet in our midst declaring the Healing Sabbath for one and for all. There is simply a reminder that we are one human family and that the mouth of the prophet speaks for us all.

So listen! Pay attention! And respond!

Amen.

La Fuente de Identidad

By Rev. Gusti Linnea Newquist

Genesis 1:1-5
Mark 1:4-11


It all begins right here: The Font of Our Identity. A river of grace that flows from the beginning of time . . . to the end of time . . . and every time in between . . .

Because in the beginning, our Scriptures tell us, the earth was empty and had no form. But the God of Genesis did not create the heavens and the earth ‘out of nothing’ as Western Christianity has come to believe. According to the first chapter of Genesis, God birthed the new creation that culminated in humanity from the marriage of a dry and barren soul-sucking desert on the one hand and a deep dark chaotic storm system on the other. This is how the desert people of the Ancient Near East who wrote the Book of Genesis understood the cosmic origins of their existence, in a sweeping mythic narrative whose deep truth dwarfs any contemporary need to read this sacred story as literal or scientific fact.

The deep mythic truth we glean from our Ancient Near East biblical ancestors is this: in the beginning the earth was a formless void, and turbulent waters were covered by darkness, and the God of our ancestors whom we worship and serve still today birthed a new creation from out of this chaos. A creation that includes everything that came before us and everything that will come after us. All beginning right here at the Font of Identity from a river of grace that flows from the beginning of time . . . to the end of time . . . and every time in between . . .

And a ruach of God—meaning a wind or breath or Spirit! of God—was swooping over these deep chaotic turbulent waters of primordial existence. And the Word of God spoke! And the Word of God said, “Let there be!” And there was! Over and over and over again! And God saw that it was good! And it was!

And there was order out of chaos! And there was life out of desolation! And there was hope out of despair! And there was humanity out of earth and water and spirit and word. You and me and all of creation bound together in one common cosmic conception: from earth, water, spirit and word. Which is who we have always been. From the very beginning. La fuente de identidad. Which is why everything we do to the earth we are also doing to ourselves. And everything we do the waters we are also doing to ourselves. And everything we do to the image of God in everyone else we meet we are also doing to ourselves.

The foundation of our identity as God’s good creation is this: we were created to make life flourish! The same way this river of the water of life makes life flourish! It was the first commandment ever given to humankind: a co-creating task from the Creator of all right here in the first chapter of Genesis in the job description of the human race, the foundation of our identity in the image of God: we are to make life flourish, to cultivate gardens and create cities,  to celebrate abundance, to care for creation as creation has cared for us, to delight in the earth and the water and the wind and the word without which not one of us would have our existence.

Wouldn’t it have been great if we could have just closed the book right there?!

But we didn’t. We fell.

We can call it the Garden of Eden and the Tree and the Apple. Or we can call it the profound failure of the human race to rest in Sabbath delight of the glory of the creation that defines every part of our identity, in the blessed miracle of each one of our lives birthed from the divine union of water and earth and wind and word.

Whatever we call it, we have chosen to know evil, as well as good. And we have chosen to practice evil, as well as good. And by the time we get to the Gospel lesson from Mark, the people of God who are our biblical ancestors have indeed known evil of every kind and practiced evil of every kind. They have murdered and they have been murdered. They have raped, and they have been raped. They have enslaved, and they have enslaved others. They have begun wars, and they have been victims of wars. They have been thrown into exile, and they have thrown others into exile. And by the time we get to the Gospel lesson from Mark, they are crushed under Roman occupation that controls every part of their lives.

As far as they can tell the land of promise and plenty has devolved dangerously close to that formless void and chaotic turbulent deep water of chaos that God calmed in the beginning. And they want God to start over, to make things right again. So they gather at the river around a man named John, who proclaims a baptism of ritual purification in preparation for another new creation. And along comes Jesus. And the rest, as they say, is history.

But this history of the baptism of Jesus should be familiar to us. It flows from the same river of grace from the beginning of creation! With the same ruach of God—but we’re speaking Greek now, so it’s a pneuma—but it’s still the same Spirit of God swooping yet again over the face of the waters. And it’s the same Word of God speaking yet again through the chaos, saying, “This is my Beloved . . . my Son . . . in whom I am well pleased.” And God saw yet again that it was very, very good. And it was!

Which is what Jesus proclaimed throughout his ministry to anyone who would pay attention! You are all God’s Beloved children! So pay attention to what you are doing to one another! Pay attention! The new creation is at hand! I have passed through its waters and you can too! And it is GOOD NEWS! To whom? The poor! The captives! The blind! The oppressed! RIGHT HERE! RIGHT NOW!

Because this new creation springs forth from the font of an identity that has been with us all along! That we may all flourish in abundant life! That we may release our desire to know evil or experience evil or enact evil! That we may end once and for all the cycle of violence that claims our existence! And with the gift of our collectively transformed and renewed lives, we can end the cycle of violence that claims human existence! We can END it! Which is what we mean when we talk about a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”

I used the New Century Translation for this part of our Gospel reading this morning because it gives a full meaning to the Greek word usually translated as “repentance.” So often we equate repentance with badness: I did wrong. I confess. I promise not to do it again. And this is certainly one way to understand that term. But the Greek work metanoia is about transformation! A new heart! A new mind! A new life! A new creation dawning from whatever chaos of deserted land or turbulent water would drive us to despair! And it is happening all the time!

A baptism of true repentance can be a powerful, powerful thing. A drug dealer can decide to turn his life around. An addict can seek help in recovery, and it happens right next door every day of the week! A child who has nothing can find a teacher who truly cares. And it happens right next door every day of the week! An abused spouse can leave a toxic relationship. An old cynic can learn to love. God can make a way out of no way. God can transform every part of our lives. Which is what God is doing with “all the people from Judea and Jerusalem” who are gathering at the Jordan for a baptism of repentance at the hand of John. They want God to “re-form” them as a new creation. And God does!

Of course the great debate in biblical and theological scholarship around this baptism story from the Gospel has been about why Jesus needs to be baptized. If he is truly without sin, scholars wonder, what was the point? But baptism is broader—both then and now—than the individual sins we commit and our need for forgiveness from them. Baptism is also about the sin committed against us and our need to be healed from it. And Jesus knows more than his fair share about that.  

Jesus really did, in the end, “take on” the sin of the world, and not just as a priestly sacrifice on our behalf. He was betrayed, denied, despised, rejected, beaten, oppressed by an occupying power, spat upon, tortured, killed. Experiencing in his own flesh the absolute worst of what we call “man’s inhumanity to man.” I would go so far as to say that the baptism of Jesus in the river of grace that formed the font of his identity as about sealing him in the protection of who God had always created him to be. It’s a seal of protection. It’s our font of identity that can never be destroyed! It’s about trusting God to transform the sin that would be committed against him into a resurrection of hope and a promise of everlasting victory over sin and suffering and despair. I would go so far as to say that his baptism sustained him as he encountered the sin of the world, as he stared that sin down, as he felt abandoned, as he died.

And I say that our own baptism in the river of grace the flows from the beginning of time, to the end of time, and in every time in between does the same for each one of us. That it serves as a saving grace, a healing balm, a protective seal covering whatever wounds we bear in these bodies of earth and water and wind and word. Whether those wounds are “Self-Inflicted-Nonsense,” which is the root of so much SIN. Or whether they are deep scars inflicted by a creation that has delighted far too much in knowing evil rather than glorifying good.

And when we say that we are baptized into Christ’s resurrection in the fullness of time, what we mean is that one day we will be able to touch our wounds, just like Jesus did with the so-called “doubting” Thomas. But they won’t hurt anymore because the new creation will have finally dawned and the evil we have endured will be nothing but a distant memory in light of all the goodness of God’s glorious new creation. Because this truly is the font of our identity! From the beginning of time . . . to the end of time . . . and every time in between.

And so we come home every Sunday to this baptismal oasis of healing grace, where we prepare for worship with a pitcher of water and a stream flowing in generous abundance, splashing the gift of God’s grace with delight against the marbles that form the base of this baptismal font, settling us into the peace of healing and renewal and love that is ours each Sunday as we gather to worship our Creator and unite with the common creation that is our covenant community.

This is the Font of Our Identity, beloved children of God, in whom God is so well pleased. Welcome Home.

The Beginning and the End

By Rev. Gusti Linnea Newquist

Ecclesiastes 3:1-13
Revelation 21:1-6a

What time is it?

That is the question that is always before us as people of faith. Today it is easy: January 1, 2012. “Happy New Year!” Of course, if the end-of-timers are correct, the fact that the Mayan calendar concludes with the year 2012 may mean that today marks the beginning of the end of the world as we know it. So . . . “Happy New Year!?”

(In the flippant response of the 1980s band “REM,” I feel just fine about that.)

We are justified in rolling our eyes at such nonsense, even if we did shell out 20 bucks for a box office ticket and a bag of popcorn to watch the pending apocalypse unfold at a movie theater near you. And we are justified in dismissing such talk of the 2012 “end of time” as so much attention-seeking or escapism or fear-mongering. And we are justified in repudiating the glorification of death and destruction that too often coincides with the dramatization of “the last days.”

But if we take the gospel seriously we are only justified to a point. Because the truth is that the Christian hope in the coming kingdom of God, the Christian hope in that “end of time” when all of creation will come to ultimate and everlasting perfect communion with God and one another, the Christian hope in that “peaceable kingdom where the wolf shall dwell with the lamb and nation shall not rise up against nation and death and mourning and crying and pain will be no more” is, quite literally, the heart and soul of the ministry of Jesus.  

“The time is fulfilled,” Jesus says, as he begins his preaching ministry in Mark’s Gospel. “The kingdom of God has come near.” And then he proceeds to touch and teach and heal all he meets in the name of the kingdom that is at hand. And he dies for it when the coming presence of God’s kingdom threatens the current reality of Caesar’s kingdom. Which means that we who follow in the footsteps of Jesus should take this “coming kingdom” business very, very seriously.

What we in modern American culture think we know about the biblical basis for the coming kingdom of God at the end of time actually comes from getting stuck in literalism halfway through the one book of the Bible (Revelation) that is so clearly presented with symbolic—and not literal—imagery. We get so focused on which one of our current wars or natural disasters best fits the description of destruction in the middle chapters of Revelation that we never get to the culminating vision of wholeness and hope that was proclaimed in our New Testament reading this morning.

But that vision of wholeness and hope really is the entire point of the Revelation. In fact it is the entire point of biblical faith: that someway, somehow, God will find a way to dwell with us in eternal grace; that someway, somehow, God is already doing this; that someway, somehow we have a small taste of that coming presence in the witness of Christ, whose birth we just celebrated one week ago today. And that someway, somehow our preparations to celebrate the anniversary of the first coming of Christ have been a chance to prepare ourselves for what we call “The Second Coming of Christ.” Which is another way of speaking about this vision of wholeness and hope that really is the point of Revelation.

Again, I would urge us not to get caught up in a literalism that has always been intended to be symbolic. We are talking about a vision here. We are talking about a future hope that cannot be put into words and that, quite frankly, we cannot really understand. “As little as children know in their mother’s womb about their birth,” Martin Luther said, “so little do we know about life everlasting.”

And so we call it “the kingdom of God” or “the Second Coming” or “the end of times” or “the heavenly banquet.” Or, as Martin Luther called it, “the life everlasting.” Each phrase a symbolic representation of our grasping for words to describe something we can sense but cannot quite comprehend, something for which we long but cannot quite possess.

And yet it is this hope in “life-everlasting” that permeates the Scriptures and that grounds our common life together in worship throughout the year. “To everything there is a season” says the preacher in Ecclesiastes, and the seasons of the Christian calendar are no different.  We begin with Advent, preparing for the coming of Christ, and move through the season of Christmas in celebration of his coming. And yes, Christmas is a season and not just a Sunday, and we are still in it! Right here, right now. In Epiphany, we see that Christ is for the world and not just for us, but then we move into contemplative and reflective season of Lent, reminding ourselves what we who are far too human do to the coming kingdom of God. In Easter—another season and not just a Sunday—we celebrate the hope that God’s kingdom really can overcome all evil, and on Pentecost we usher in a whole new life in the Spirit that is the life of the church in these past 2000+ years.

Each season of the Christian calendar offers God an opportunity to train our hearts and minds and bodies and spirits into the new creation in Christ we are invited to become in the fullness of time. Each season has its ebb and its flow, its contemplation and its action. And each season points to that time when we shall dwell in the house of God forever.

Over the course of the recent season of Advent, for example, I spoke openly about the place of Advent in our liturgical calendar as a time of preparing for this “Second Coming,” for this “end time,” for this “heavenly banquet” that is our Christian hope. And I will say now that this 12-day period we currently celebrate between Christmas and Epiphany is, if we are living according to the seasons, a time for living as if the Second Coming has, in fact, come!

Imagine! What might it be like if, for just these few days in the beginning of 2012, we really did live as if this were the end of the world as we know it, if we really did live as if 2012 were the beginning of the new heaven and the new earth we have glimpsed in our vision from Revelation. Because this is, in fact, the “season” we are in.

Perhaps this new reality in this new year might be something like what many of us have seen in the YouTube videos of an 18-year old young man with a life-threatening heart condition chronicling his experiences of “cheating death” and then spending the short remainder of his young life using those experiences to help him dwell in the peace that passes all understanding. And sharing it with others.

With a comforting smile and a serene presence in these videos, Ben Breedlove describes the bright light and the deep sense of peace that accompanied three separate occasions in his life when he almost died: the first when he was four, the last just a few weeks ago. “I couldn’t stop smiling,” he said, of all three occasions. “I wish I never woke up,” he claimed of his most recent experience. And his wish to rest in that bright light forever came true on Christmas Day when death finally claimed him and peace finally enveloped him, and the rest of us were left to marvel at his wisdom and insight and trust.

“Do you believe in Angels or God?” Ben Breedlove writes at the end of his last YouTube video. “I do,” he says. “I do.” And how could he not, given his experience of peace in the face of his mortality? And how could he not want to share that peace with anyone who would pay attention, through a YouTube video that has spanned the globe and made national headlines. And how could we not respond with reverence and hope and trust in return?

It is truly an “apocalyptic vision” that Ben Breedlove has shared with us: apocalypse meaning “revelation,” apocalypse meaning a vision of reality that is ever-present before us but that we need help seeing and experiencing and sharing with others. Apocalypse meaning a chance to wake up and live in the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot ever overcome it. Which is what the Book of Revelation is trying to get across. No matter what God is still with us. In this life and the next.

In the fullness of time, the beginning and the end turn out to be one and the same, and this is the final point of our lesson from Revelation. “I am the Alpha and Omega,” Christ says, “the beginning and the end.” And the point of the peace that passes understanding isn’t just about preparing us for our death, as beautiful as that is. It’s about invigorating our life! It’s about walking together on this planet with the promise that the communion of the saints is real and that everyone—and everything—we encounter lives in the light that can never be extinguished, the kind of light that leaves us smiling forever and full of a peace we don’t want to wake up from.

How would we treat each other if we really saw this reality that is ever before us? If we really knew this with every part of our being? It truly would be the end of the world as we know it, with our wars and our greed and our suffering. It would, I dare say, be an excellent thing for 2012 to usher in the “end of time” with a peace that passes understanding.

We have a chance to practice that peace when we come to the table this morning, where the “Last Supper” Christ introduced to his disciples just before his death becomes the “first fruit” of the heavenly banquet we share in the fullness of time. In fact, the whole point of the Sacrament is to give us a brief taste of the “perfect communion” that is coming, to live for one brief moment as if the kingdom really has already come. Because, in a very real sense, it has.

So come to the table with the posture of one whose life of despair and destruction and devastation is ending in 2012, whose new life is dawning with a bright light and an overwhelming peace that will guide us and protect us and strengthen us in the days to come. However they begin. And however they end. In this new year, and in every precious year that is given to us on this earth.

I pray it may be so. Amen.