Dr. Mark Owen Fenstermacher December 21, 2014 THE GREAT INTRODUCTION: The Inviter. First United Methodist Church/The Open Door (Bloomington, IN)

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1 Dr. Mark Owen Fenstermacher December 21, 2014 THE GREAT INTRODUCTION: The Inviter. First United Methodist Church/The Open Door (Bloomington, IN) Superheroes take care of problems without a whole lot of help from the rest of the world. I hesitate to say this because I know that those of you who are seriously into comic books will point out all the exceptions where that isn t true. You ll point out how The Avengers or the Guardians of the Galaxy work as a team, but the truth is they do their thing while the rest of the world watches. You ll say Batman needs Robin, you ll say Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen might play a small role in what Superman is up to, but the truth is the whole world stands around while Superman or Spiderman are battling the villains. Pedestrians stand screaming on sidewalks, passengers or jet planes or city buses watch in fear and amazement as the superhero battles the bad guys through the streets of Gotham City. That s sort of the way it is with superheroes, at least when it comes to DC Comics or Marvel Comics. We watch Superman spin the world counterclockwise so time is reversed and the bad stuff is undone. All we do is watch and wait. If the world is going to be saved, then it will be up to Superman or Spiderman or Batman or the Avengers or Captain America or Guardians of the Galaxy. This isn t how it is with God. At least this isn t how it is with the Jewish-Christian understanding of how God works. God has no intention of letting our role be that of bystanders. God asks us to do more than stand back, wait and watch as God spins the world counterclockwise so the bad stuff is undone. In the drama of what God is up to in the world there is more than one actor! We see this in the birth of Jesus. Superman may spin the earth counterclockwise to undo bad stuff and help heal the world as we all watch, but that s not how God works. And we see this in the incarnation. We see this throughout the different narratives of the Bible and we see this especially in the story of the birth of Jesus. God invites us to be partners with God in what God is doing to save and heal the world. God has no interest in doing all of this on God s own while we stand around on a sidewalk, slack jawed in amazement, wonder, suspense and fear. I find this fascinating and just a bit puzzling. God speaks creation into existence. God creates light and time and hydrogen and DNA and dark matter and music, God carves the mountains and levels the prairies, God breathes life into man and into woman, God invents wisdom and truth that offer us a way out of ignorance and self-destruction, and then God turns to us and says, I want you to help me. I need you to help me. What kind of God goes to ordinary people and asks for their help in doing important work? When I was in high school, our high school chemistry instructor was someone who had been a full professor in the physics department at the University of Illinois. The word was that he had actually been a part of the atomic project on the campus of the University of Chicago years before. Dr. Appleton had retired, moved to a lake near our small town, and decided to take a job as a curriculum consultant with the local school corporation. Dr. Appleton also taught some chemistry and physics classes in the high school. I was in one of his chemistry classes. Let me tell you: Dr. Appleton and I operated in two completely different worlds. He was to chemistry and physics what Bach or Mozart were to 1

2 music. He was to science what Willie Mays was to baseball and Michael Jordan was to basketball. I should have never been in his class. He was kind. He was patient. But I sat in the back row of his chemistry class and did my best to become invisible. Did you ever have a class where you hoped and prayed, every day, that the instructor would look right past you? Did you ever have a class where you hoped and prayed that the instructor would never, ever, ask you to come forward and help solve a problem? The truth is he gave me a C in the class, and I didn t deserve anything that good. He was so smart that I believe he was extra gracious with me. It may be that he attributed my struggles to his inability to shift from a university setting to communicating high school chemistry. Actually, I don t think Dr. Appleton thought anyone could be as dense as I appeared to be when it came to basic chemistry. What kind of God turns to his creatures and says, I want you to help me? What kind of God looks to the people who sit in the back row, doing their best to be invisible, and says, I need you to help me solve this? Would you come up here? Look through the Bible. The whole thing is rather stunning! Personally, I am somewhat shocked at the people God taps on the shoulder. (And, yes, every time I look in the mirror I shake my head and think, What in the world were you doing when you thought of calling a rascal like me to run this errand for you? ) Abram, we ll find out, is asked by God to be an example of faith to as many people as there are stars in the sky, and then later Abram will lie his way across Egypt. Sarai is asked to bear a child in her old age, and she laughs at the promises of God! Later, she will play along with Abram s lie that she is his sister and Sarai will end up living as a member of the Egyptian harem. Joseph, an arrogant and vain youngest brother, is asked by God to help Egypt to plan for a seven year famine, and thus preserve the lives of the Hebrew people. Moses is chosen to lead the people out of slavery. He is the last person you d think God would choose: he had committed manslaughter, was a fugitive from justice, probably scored high on the introversion scale, and every time he spoke it sounded like he had a mouth full of marbles! In the 1 st chapter of Luke, the angel Gabriel visits a second-rate little town called Nazareth. Instead of going to one of the leading households in the city, instead of choosing someone from the highly educated elite, instead of selecting someone connected with the ruling class, the angel of God goes to a very young, small town girl. The angel tells Mary she should rejoice. She is told that she has been favored by God (which usually means God is tapping you on the shoulder for some task for a serving thing). All of this, Luke says, confuses her. She is, I m confident, stunned by the appearance of the angel. These words about favor and the Lord being with her are more puzzling than good news. The angel tells the young woman that she is going to conceive, give birth to a son, name him Jesus, and he will rule forever. Now, most of us might be intimidated by an angel. Afraid to say what we re thinking. You may have an angel like that in your family or in your office: everyone is afraid to tell them what they re thinking when the angel says how it is going to be. Gabriel may be a big deal when it comes to angels, but Mary speaks right back up and starts asking questions. Which tells us something about her courage. Which tells us something about the fact that she is a clear-headed thinker. Knowing the story of Jesus as we do, this young peasant girl is going to need all the courage and clear-headed thinking she can imagine! How will this happen since I haven t had sexual relations with a man? she asks. 2

3 The angel s explanation raises more questions in Mary s mind, I suspect. Gabriel says, The Holy Spirit will come over you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the one who is to be born will be holy. He will be called God s Son. (1:35-36) There must be a look on Mary s face that is impossible to miss. The angel must see that this talk about the Holy Spirit and the Most High overshadowing Mary is a puzzle. So, as evidence that God is up to something big in her life and in the life of the world, Gabriel points to the pregnancy of Elizabeth: Look, even in her old age, your relative Elizabeth has conceived a son. This woman who was labeled unable to conceive is now six months pregnant. Nothing is impossible with God. (:36-37) That s not overwhelming proof, I would say. The angel points to the pregnancy of Elizabeth, and observes that Nothing is impossible with God. That s good enough for Mary. Instead of demanding more proof, instead of insisting on having every question answered before she will agree to go along with outrageous, unexpected, unconventional plan God has cooked up, Mary nods when she is told about pregnancy of her older relative, Elizabeth, and says, I am the Lord s servant. Let it be with me just as you have said. What kind of God invites the very young and the very old, the very faithful and very broken, the very confident and the very fearful, to partner with God in the saving of the world the healing of creation the construction of a world where justice and peace and community are an everyday reality? What God says to people like you and me, I want you to help me? I need you to help me? I mean, you d think any God worth his salt would be able to take care of things without needing our help. Like some kind of divine Spiderman or Superman fixing what is broken and taking care of those who would threaten the innocent. Here is what I think: God s approach to us, God s approach to Abram and Sarai, Moses and Rahab, Mary and Joseph, Elizabeth and Zechariah, is one more evidence of God s love for us. If God didn t love us, God would let us stand on the sidelines. If God didn t care about us, God would do what God is going to do and let us be passive bystanders. You know something about me: whenever I am I wrestling with any issue, asking any question about God and life and relationships, I come to that conversation wanting what is said in the 4 th chapter of the small, New Testament letter of 1 st John to shape the answer. I m a 1 st John 4 guy when it comes to figuring out God and interpreting the Bible. What do we find in the 4 th chapter of 1 st John? This is what that early Christian letter says: This is love: not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son as the sacrifice that deals with our sins. That is verse 10. Verse 16b goes on to say this: God is love, and those who remain in love remain in God and God remains in them. Verse 19 announces, We love because God first loved us. So this invitation God issues to Abram and Sarai, Moses and Rahab, Elizabeth and Zechariah, Mary and Joseph, is one more evidence of God s love for us. How so? How is God tapping us on the shoulder, calling us to play our part in the drama of God s work to heal the world, to love all no matter what, to offer forgiveness, to speak uncomfortable truth to powers and principalities, to do the hard work of creating grace-filled communities, evidence of God s love? God invites us into God s unfolding, saving, healing, loving work because God knows we grow best when we take on the work of partnering with God. If God would have chosen to allow us to be perpetually passive, sitting on the sidelines, we would have been condemned to unending infancy. 3

4 There is something that happens when we risk for God, when we speak up for God and that speaking up brings a harvest of criticism, when we kneel and wash feet, when we offer a grace that people around us find scandalous, when we afflict the empire with the truth about the poor and the powerless, tell the story of children growing up in poverty, and what happens is we grow up. We get more real. We mature. We start growing up when life becomes an adventure in cross carrying rather than exercise in getting our way and keeping ourselves entertained. In the 4 th chapter of Ephesians, Paul talks about the way God has blessed us all in the church with a spiritual gift. All of these, Paul says, are to equip God s people for the work of serving and building up the body of Christ until we all reach the unity of faith and knowledge of God s Son. God s goal is for us to become mature adults to be fully grown, measured by the standard of the fullness of Christ. Instead of being like infants, tossed this way and that by every kind of impulse or false teaching, we are to grow in every way into Christ. God says I need your help and the reason God does that is because there is a need. And the other reason God taps us on the shoulder is because God knows that when we take a risk for God, when we are bold enough to get up and walk into a new life when Jesus says Follow me, we start growing up. Becoming more and more real. One of my favorite authors, Anne Lamott, tells about deciding to do a hard thing. She had gotten pregnant with her son, Sam, during Advent years ago. She and Sam s father had almost no contact. The family was broken. Then, one year, they decided to take a risk and go visit young Sam s half brother who was forty years old. Everyone in the family had hesitated to bring Sam and his older half-brother s family together. With their father in the same room. It was scary. I think it is almost scary to listen to the voice of God, and put your life in the hands of God s Holy Spirit. So Sam and Anne went to Canada for the visit. Anne holed up in her hotel room with CNN and used Kit Kat bars as a way of dealing with the tension. She worried about Sam s brother not reaching out or Sam going into adolescent glower mode. She imagined everything that could go wrong. As she ate some Milanos out of the mini-bar, she prayed to keep the faith. Anne will be the first to tell you she has a lot of faith, but she also is afraid a lot. She remembers something her friend, Father Tom, said about faith: Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, for example, to go for a walk. During Advent, Anne observes, Christians prepare for the birth of Jesus, which means the true light. Sometimes Anne wonders if God will break through the confusion and fear and mess in the world in her life. All I can do, she writes in Plan B ( Sam s Brother ), is stay close to God, and my friends. I notice the darkness, light a few candles, scatter some seeds. Hope is not logical. It always comes as a surprise, just when you think all hope is lost. Hope is the cousin to grief, and both take time: you can t short-circuit grief, or emptiness, and you can t patch it up with your bicycle tire tube kit. Before heading over to the family dinner, Anne stopped by a small stone church. The church brought some comfort but she still worried about the dinner. What would happen if Sam got his heart broken again? Still, she went. She took the risk. She took a cab to John s house, and somehow they all survived. Sam s brother and his wife had a new baby, and the baby was lovely beyond words. Nothing dramatic happened. People just spent the evening in the same room, even if they were uncomfortable, so Sam could know his brother and his brother s family. There was kindness in the room, Anne remembers. Something larger than her fears and anxieties got them all through the evening. Anne says life is cracked and fragile, but the glue is the beating of her own heart and love. The next morning she lay in bed giving thanks for having come from where she was before Sam knew his dad and where they were now. The leaves on the tree outside the hotel 4

5 window had fallen, and the tree looked like it was sick and in trouble. I could only lean on my shaky Advent faith that things would be okay, more or less, that we are connected, and that everyone -everyone- eventually falls into the hands of God. I pray, and try to be kind, and go to church Anne had invited everyone over to her hotel room for lunch and a movie. She was anxious as she waited for people to get there. The rain came down loud and hard. She couldn t wait to get home because it was the perfect time to plant bulbs and scatter seeds, in the hope that some would grow. She writes: But meanwhile, in Advent, we show up when we are needed; we try to help, we prepare for an end to the despair. And we do this together. God invites us to show when we are needed, to try and help, and God does this because in playing our part, taking a risk, living by faith and acting with courage, we grow up into Christ. We become real. We mature. We deepen. We are more free and whole. There are two other reasons I would mention about how God s invitation into God s unfolding work is an expression of God s love. When we say Yes to God s invitation, even when the work is hard, we grow and deepen and mature and become more real. In ways we never will if life is about our comfort and security and being entertained. The second way God blesses us by God s invitation is that people and places are reached through us that God might could never reach if God showed up in all God s glory. The unfiltered glory of God is blinding. We talked about that a week or two ago as we looked at that moment in the book of Exodus when Moses asks to see the full glory of God. God tells Moses that we can t see the full glory of God and live. So God places Moses over behind a rock (there is a hymn in our hymnal about this moment), and God passes by. But Moses is only allowed to see the backside of God, and even then God uses his hands to cover the eyes of Moses. There are people hungry for hope, there are people whose lives are being wrecked by fear or addiction or the need for power, and God has a better chance of reaching them and loving them through ordinary you than if God showed up in God s full glory. I heard someone a few weeks ago say they bought a Christmas tree with one thousand white lights already placed on the tree. She said when she plugged the tree in it was so bright that you almost need sunglasses. The woman s elderly mother lives in the same house. When the daughter went off on a Caribbean vacation, her mother stayed home. The mother said, I never turned the tree on one time. It is blinding! So God can reach people, can touch some broken and hurting places, straighten out some crooked places, through you. If God showed up, the people you know might go running. But when ordinary you shows up, when ordinary you shows up to listen or offer a word or pray, when ordinary you brings in some food or mows the yard or shares a kind of grace that invites honesty and life change, things may happen. Life may break out. So God needs us because God needs us. We can reach people God might only scare off if God showed up in God s full glory! And, lastly, God invites us into what God is doing because there is joy in being a part of it. It may involve cross carrying or feet washing or speaking hard or loving when loving is the last thing we want to do, but somehow joy always shows up when we are where God needs for us to be. Maybe that is somehow a part of Mary s Yes. 5

6 When we are where we need to be with God, when we respond to the Spirit that would lead us on some great or small adventure for God, there is joy. There is rightness about life when we say, I am the Lord s servant. Let it be with me just as you have said. There will be hard days. There are still unanswered questions. But there is always joy in the journey with God even when there may be a cross ah`ead for us. I thought of this the other evening as I visited newborn Lydia. I thought about the work of childbirth, a mystery that I -as a man- can only dimly appreciate. And I think, secretly, I am glad I am male and I don t have to face the decision of whether or not I would -if I were a woman- go through that pain. The other evening I saw a video of our daughter-in-law s tummy as Max was moving around.. The little boy inside her was moving around so enthusiastically it looked to me as if he were searching for a way out. I studied the young mother and her husband as they told me of the birth of Lydia. I thought of the pain and work, and they told me of the joy. Then, as a nurse did some blood work on Lydia before she was to be discharged, I walked over to the basinet and looked at that sleeping girl. And my heart skipped a beat. My eyes felt like they were going to fill up and so I stepped back. Sometimes I see the pain of saying Yes to God. But then I see the joy we miss when we avoid God s call shrug at the voice and retreat into a life that is all about comfort and convenience and being entertained. So the young girl says Yes. The life comes. She travels south to Judea to spend time with Elizabeth. There is Joseph. There is difficult journey to Bethlehem. There is no room. There is a stable or small barn. There is the smell of straw and the stink of manure and the cold air that refuses to be held at bay. There is pain and blood and birth and there is the Child. And there is joy. As there always is when we trust the voice and call of the One who loves us best. There is joy when we let take our place in God s drama. 6