Romans 10:5-13, The Message

The earlier revelation was intended simply to get us ready for the Messiah, who then puts everything right for those who trust him to do it. Moses wrote that anyone who insists on using the law code to live right before God soon discovers it’s not so easy—every detail of life regulated by fine print! But trusting God to shape the right living in us is a different story—no precarious climb up to heaven to recruit the Messiah, no dangerous descent into hell to rescue the Messiah. So what exactly was Moses saying?

The word that saves is right here,
    as near as the tongue in your mouth,
    as close as the heart in your chest.

It’s the word of faith that welcomes God to go to work and set things right for us. This is the core of our preaching. Say the welcoming word to God—“Jesus is my Master”—embracing, body and soul, God’s work of doing in us what he did in raising Jesus from the dead. That’s it. You’re not “doing” anything; you’re simply calling out to God, trusting him to do it for you. That’s salvation. With your whole being you embrace God setting things right, and then you say it, right out loud: “God has set everything right between him and me!”

Scripture reassures us, “No one who trusts God like this—heart and soul—will ever regret it.” It’s exactly the same no matter what a person’s religious background may be: the same God for all of us, acting the same incredibly generous way to everyone who calls out for help. “Everyone who calls, ‘Help, God!’ gets help.”

Oh, my goodness, I love what Eugene Peterson has done with this passage! “The word of faith” apparently sounds a whole lot like this:

HELP.

And anyone who calls out ‘help,’ will be heard. And will be helped. Paul defines help as having everything set right between God and us. And that is precisely why that little baby came to that virgin, to that stable, to this world.

To set things right. To bring help. 

God became small so that we might find help. So that we could stop scrambling our feeble way up to heaven and learn to rest in the love of God. So that we could give up our incessant need to be our own savior, so that we could stop trying so hard to earn God’s pleasure.

God became small so that we might become whole.

Thank you, God, for the sheer insanity of your plan. Thank you for the strange wonder of it all, for the smallness you embraced, for the life you lived as one of us, for the love you gave us with every breath, right up until that last one. Thank you for the gift of life, real life, and for freedom from trying so dang hard all the time to ‘get it right.’ We don’t have to because you have done it!

Luke 1:26-38, NRSV

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” 

But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” 

Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” 

Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

Then the angel departed from her.

And here she is, that young virgin. Center stage as we move ever closer to Christmas Day. 

What a woman this is! A girl, actually. Young, impressionable, but . . . in tune with the God of the universe. Open to mystery and paradox. One who listened well, one who said a resounding, ‘YES.’

I cannot imagine it. I know this story so very well, and I love it. But in truth, I cannot imagine this scene. This visitation. This unveiling. This sweet acceptance.

Yet, here it is. She ‘found favor’ with God, simply by being her own sweet self. I imagine she had a good deal of (good and necessary) vinegar in her personality as well. How else could she have survived all of this? A compliant spirit, but a sturdy backbone — what a combo!

I really like her. She has spunk and strength even she doesn’t know about at this point in the story. She goes on to raise this little one into manhood, and then she is confused by all of it at times, and yet. . .

there’s that word again! 

And yet . . . she proves up to the challenge. 

All of the challenge that being the mother of God brings into her life. Ultimately, she becomes one of the earliest evangelists, a member of the church before it was called ‘the church,’ a faithful follower of the baby she bore.

Amazing.

Lord Jesus, thank you for loving your mom. Even as you were dying, you looked out for her. As all sons do, you got impatient with her sometimes, and you set her straight when she needed to be set straight. But through it all, you loved her well. Help me to love your mother well, too. And help me to love the mothering parts of me, too.

 Judges 13:2-24, NRSV

There was a certain man of Zorah, of the tribe of the Danites, whose name was Manoah. His wife was barren, having borne no children. And the angel of the Lord appeared to the woman and said to her, “Although you are barren, having borne no children, you shall conceive and bear a son. Now be careful not to drink wine or strong drink, or to eat anything unclean, for you shall conceive and bear a son. No razor is to come on his head, for the boy shall be a nazirite to God from birth. It is he who shall begin to deliver Israel from the hand of the Philistines.” Then the woman came and told her husband, “A man of God came to me, and his appearance was like that of an angel of God, most awe-inspiring; I did not ask him where he came from, and he did not tell me his name; but he said to me, ‘You shall conceive and bear a son. So then drink no wine or strong drink, and eat nothing unclean, for the boy shall be a nazirite to God from birth to the day of his death.’”

Then Manoah entreated the Lord, and said, “O Lord, I pray, let the man of God whom you sent come to us again and teach us what we are to do concerning the boy who will be born.” God listened to Manoah, and the angel of God came again to the woman as she sat in the field; but her husband Manoah was not with her. So the woman ran quickly and told her husband, “The man who came to me the other day has appeared to me.” Manoah got up and followed his wife, and came to the man and said to him, “Are you the man who spoke to this woman?” And he said, “I am.” Then Manoah said, “Now when your words come true, what is to be the boy’s rule of life; what is he to do?” The angel of the Lord said to Manoah, “Let the woman give heed to all that I said to her. She may not eat of anything that comes from the vine. She is not to drink wine or strong drink, or eat any unclean thing. She is to observe everything that I commanded her.”

Manoah said to the angel of the Lord, “Allow us to detain you, and prepare a kid for you.” The angel of the Lord said to Manoah, “If you detain me, I will not eat your food; but if you want to prepare a burnt offering, then offer it to the Lord.” (For Manoah did not know that he was the angel of theLord.) Then Manoah said to the angel of theLord, “What is your name, so that we may honor you when your words come true?” But the angel of theLord said to him, “Why do you ask my name? It is too wonderful.”

So Manoah took the kid with the grain offering, and offered it on the rock to the Lord, to him who works wonders. When the flame went up toward heaven from the altar, the angel of the Lord ascended in the flame of the altar while Manoah and his wife looked on; and they fell on their faces to the ground. The angel of the Lord did not appear again to Manoah and his wife. Then Manoah realized that it was the angel of the Lord. And Manoah said to his wife, “We shall surely die, for we have seen God.” But his wife said to him, “If theLord had meant to kill us, he would not have accepted a burnt offering and a grain offering at our hands, or shown us all these things, or now announced to us such things as these.”

The woman bore a son, and named him Samson. The boy grew, and the Lord blessed him.

Years ago, I wrote a series of readers’ theater versions of several biblical narratives. This one was one of my favorites. The angel comes to the woman, who doesn’t even merit mention of her own name. 

Did you catch that? The angel comes to the woman, not to her husband. And dear Manoah, he just can’t quite wrap his head around this. God is supposed to speak to the man of the house, right?

Wrong.

God speaks to whomever God chooses. And this time, God chose the wife. More than once. And it is the wife who has the spiritual sensitivity to understand what has happened, while her husband is mightily confused.

God chooses women more often than we’ve been led to believe. And this choosing, in this small story, foreshadows another choosing, one we celebrate during this season. When God came to a lowly woman, at least in the eyes of the community in which she lived. But who was, in truth, a person of great stature in the eyes of God.

Gabriel said so.

That Mary — she had to be something, don’t you think?

Thank you for surprising us, Lord. For turning our expectations on their heads, for confounding tradition and habit and human injustice, sometimes in very subtle and subversive ways. Like coming to the unnamed wife. Like coming to the young virgin. Like coming to us in her womb. Oh, thank you.

2 Samuel 6:12-19, NRSV

Then King David was told, “The Lord has blessed the household of Obed-edom and all that belongs to him, because of the ark of God.” So David went and brought up the ark of God from the house of Obed-edom to the city of David with rejoicing; and when those who bore the ark of the Lord had gone six paces, he sacrificed an ox and a fatling. David danced before the Lord with all his might; David was girded with a linen ephod. So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet.

As the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal daughter of Saul looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before theLord; and she despised him in her heart.

They brought in the ark of the Lord, and set it in its place, inside the tent that David had pitched for it; and David offered burnt offerings and offerings of well-being before the Lord.When David had finished offering the burnt offerings and the offerings of well-being, he blessed the people in the name of the Lord of hosts, and distributed food among all the people, the whole multitude of Israel, both men and women, to each a cake of bread, a portion of meat, and a cake of raisins. Then all the people went back to their homes.

This is a fascinating selection for Advent, don’t you think? A time of great celebration in David’s reign — the return of the ark to the people of God. And in these short verses, we see two distinctly different responses to that great event:

David danced with all his might. . .

and

Michal despised David in her heart because of it.

I so want to be a mighty dancer. I do! But too often, I think I’m actually more like Michal, holding judgment in my heart and too much disapproval.

I wonder if Michal knew how she was shutting off her heart. Because that’s what judgment and disapproval do — they shut off our hearts. David offered what he had — his own body and his deep sense of joy and fulfillment. So what if it wasn’t ‘seemly?’ So what?

We fuss around an awful lot sometimes. About really dumb things. Maybe this Advent, I can let go of some of that fussiness and take a few tentative dance steps just because God is good.

Oh, Lord. Forgive my foolishness. Because that interior frown, that sideways glance of disdain — those are foolish. Truly. Help me to embrace all of who I am, and all of who others are, no matter how they dance. And then help me to spin out of that embrace for the sheer joy of it, and to dance with all my might because of how good you are. 

Hebrews 1:1-4, NRSV

Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.

Again today, this passage is a particular favorite of mine. “In these last days. . . ” God speaks to the world through a son. A son who is heir to all, through whom creation happened.

And who shows us who God is. Exactly who God is. A mirror image, a complete reflection of who God is, what God is like, ‘the exact imprint of God’s very being.’

This is amazing. THIS IS AMAZING. This is what we say we believe, it’s central to our understanding of who we are as followers of Jesus . . . and yet . . . And here, that ‘yet’ has a much more melancholy feel to it, doesn’t it?

I don’t think we live out what we say we believe. At least, not fully. If Jesus is the true image-bearer, then what we see in him cannot contradict what we say we see in God. And I guess that means that God is on the look-out for the lost, the least, the littlest, the last. Because that’s what Jesus did, that’s who Jesus was.

God is not interested in our power structures, our organizational skills, our decisions about who’s out and who’s in because Jesus wasn’t.  

And, friends. . . that is earth-shaking. Truly.

Oh, Jesus. Oh, Yahweh. Oh, Spirit. Sometimes I think I play you off against one another in my head. And yet, your word tells me that Jesus is the real deal, the whole enchilada, the perfect picture of GOD. Help me to reach for the hem of your garment, Lord, every single day. Because I need to remind myself that you walked these dusty roads with us and that you broke every stereotype, every preconception, every human understanding of who God is and what God is about. Hallelujah!

Mark 9:9-13, The Message

Coming down the mountain, Jesus swore them to secrecy. “Don’t tell a soul what you saw. After the Son of Man rises from the dead, you’re free to talk.” They puzzled over that, wondering what on earth “rising from the dead” meant.

Meanwhile they were asking, “Why do the religion scholars say that Elijah has to come first?”

Jesus replied, “Elijah does come first and get everything ready for the coming of the Son of Man. They treated this Elijah like dirt, much like they will treat the Son of Man, who will, according to Scripture, suffer terribly and be kicked around contemptibly.”

This little snippet of a passage comes at the tail end of one of my favorite gospel narratives: the transfiguration. I love that story for lots of reasons — Jesus glows (!!), three of the disciples are chosen for some extra revelation (and they don’t get it, at all), and most of all? Because Jesus has a very rich, personal encounter with God the Father, who encourages him on the cusp of his coming suffering, who tells his closest followers that Jesus is the one to listen to, the one worth following.

And then, Jesus says the words that I’ve highlighted here: don’t tell anybody! 

Don’t tell anybody? Are you serious? We’ve just had the experience of a lifetime and we cannot talk about it?

But apparently, that isn’t what troubles the disciples here. Oh, no, they’re kind of caught up in the details — the gnarly, religious details. Why do the scholars say . . .

Oh, Lord, deliver me from religious nit-picking!! Help me to stand in awe of who you are, to be blown away by why you came, to stand gap-jawed at your glory. 

And then, let me tell somebody about it, okay?

How I wish I could have been there for this one, Lord! I love reading about it. But there are days when I could really use a heavenly visitation, you know? Please give me the wisdom to know when to speak and when not to speak. And when it’s time to talk, will you help me find the best words? Thank you!

Acts 3:17—4:4 , NRSV

“And now, friends, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers.In this way God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, that his Messiah would suffer. Repent therefore, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Messiah appointed for you, that is, Jesus, who must remain in heaven until the time of universal restoration that God announced long ago through his holy prophets. 

Moses said, ‘The Lord your God will raise up for you from your own people a prophet like me. You must listen to whatever he tells you. And it will be that everyone who does not listen to that prophet will be utterly rooted out of the people.’

And all the prophets, as many as have spoken, from Samuel and those after him, also predicted these days. You are the descendants of the prophets and of the covenant that God gave to your ancestors, saying to Abraham, ‘And in your descendants all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’ When God raised up his servant, he sent him first to you, to bless you by turning each of you from your wicked ways.”

An interesting choice for Advent, this sermon of Peter’s. And the phrase that stands out to me in this reading is one about refreshing.

Refreshing from the presence of the Lord. 

What do you think of when you read that word, ‘refresh?’ Immediately, water comes to my mind. Water to drink, to bathe in, to swim in, to spray into the hot, dry air. Water.

I don’t think it’s an accident that Jesus talks about himself as the water of life. But I’m not sure I think about that image in terms of refreshment very often. And maybe I need to! Because refreshing is what we all need. Regularly.

In the midst of tedium, of children screaming, of too many things to do and not enough time to do them, of tense relationships, of physical suffering, of our own brokenness and sinfulness — we all need to be refreshed.

So I’m glad that Peter chose to use this picture that day, that his famous sermon to all those people gathered there in Jerusalem contained a reference to ‘times of refreshing.’

Because of Jesus.

How blessed we are to be the recipients of your refreshment, O God. Thank you for forgiveness, for the ongoing work of the Spirit in us, the One who transforms us bit by bit into people who look like Jesus. 

Psalm 125, The Message

Those who trust in God   
  are like Zion Mountain:
Nothing can move it, a rock-solid mountain
  you can always depend on.
Mountains encircle Jerusalem,
  and God encircles his people—   
always has and always will.

The fist of the wicked
   will never violate
What is due the righteous,
    provoking wrongful violence.
Be good to your good people, God,
    to those whose hearts are right!
God will round up the backsliders,
    corral them with the incorrigibles.
Peace over Israel!

Ah, I do love the mountains. Almost as much as I love the coastline. And here where we live, we get both. Our home is on the downward slope of a mountain foothill and two miles further down the road, the ocean awaits.

This picture showcases our backyard view – one that I enjoy every day, maybe especially as the sun begins to set, turning the nooks and crannies shades of pink and salmon, even lavender.

Those mountains are steady. They are huge and reassuring and call forth all kinds of good images for me. The one used by the psalmist in today’s text is one that is especially dear to my heart: God encircles his people like the mountains encircle Jerusalem.

Somehow, having actual mountains to look at helps me to remember this truth. When we went ‘college shopping’ with our daughters, our eldest became distinctly uncomfortable when we drove by a UC campus that was located on a plain. “I could never go to school here,” she said. “I would feel untethered.”

Exactly.

Thank you, Lord, for being our tender tether, for encircling us with your love, grace and power. When I begin to gaze out at the world, looking for who-knows-what beyond the peaks, help me to remember that you are the one who encircles me. You are my tether. Thank you.

Habakkuk 3:13-19, NRSV

 You came forth to save your people,
    to save your anointed.
You crushed the head of the wicked house,
    laying it bare from foundation to roof. Selah

You pierced with their own arrows the head of his warriors,
    who came like a whirlwind to scatter us,
    gloating as if ready to devour the poor who were in hiding.

You trampled the sea with your horses,
    churning the mighty waters.

I hear, and I tremble within;
    my lips quiver at the sound.
Rottenness enters into my bones,
    and my steps tremble beneath me.
I wait quietly for the day of calamity
    to come upon the people who attack us.

Though the fig tree does not blossom,
    and no fruit is on the vines;
though the produce of the olive fails,
    and the fields yield no food;
though the flock is cut off from the fold,
    and there is no herd in the stalls,

yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
    I will exult in the God of my salvation.

God, the Lord, is my strength;
    he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
    and makes me tread upon the heights.

When this passage came up in the daily lectionary, I nearly wept with gratitude. It is one of my favorite favorites. Despite everything that is wrong, hard, painful, grievous — despite everything —

yet I will rejoice in the Lord.

Oh, that I might stand tall and sing with the prophet. That I might raise my hands to heaven and shout these words! YET. Just three letters, but so powerful, poignant, game-changing. 

Yet. . .

Of Lord of the ‘Yet,’ help me to be a person who clings to that ‘yet,’ who believes — soul-deep — that you are good, faithful, present. . . no.matter.what. Thank you for these words, for this declaration of trust and commitment, even in the bleakest of circumstances. Thank you for Habukkuk this Advent.