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Luke 2:41-52

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About ten years ago, a friend of mine and I spent Saturday afternoons, winter and spring 2006, visiting members of our church.  He drove, I navigated, we sipped Diet Dr. Pepper.  We used a map.  We went to call on church members who had not yet had the opportunity to make a pledge to our capital campaign.  The building it supported was mostly up, the pledges were mostly in, but we lacked a certain percentage.  The trustees, being trustees, along with the rest of us, rightly wanted to see 100% completion and participation.  All manner of mailings, some e-mailings, pulpit appeals, and phone calling were to no avail. So, we went out in the eastern suburbs of Monroe County NY, to make some doorstep, unannounced, cold call home visits.  

I remember beautiful homes, and young families, and happy greetings, and a real willingness to listen, and a desire to give. After all, these young families would most benefit from the investment other generations were making in their future.  I also remember asking my friend and driver Bob why some of these homes, large and lovely, apparently had little or no furniture.  He could give the price of the homes, close to market, about 1/3 the cost of similar property in eastern New England.  This impressed me.  But, I asked, where is the furniture?  Well, he tried to explain, some of these families have taken out as much mortgage as they could, knowing (he raised an eye brow), knowing that the value would continue to go up, and up. It was generally understood to be the wise, prudent thing to do, though, of course, it was a matter of interpretation. They would get the furniture next year.  

The memories flooded in while we watched recently the film THE BIG SHORT.  Now I see.  Now I see what I saw but I had no full way to see what I saw or fully to interpret what I saw, almost 10 years ago. How you see depends on how you interpret what you see.  Just over the horizon from winter 2006 there was about to be a great collapse, as we all now know and ruefully remember. We are still finding our interpretative way into understanding all that happened.  I can see now, pretty clearly, what Bob I think suspected, but did not say.  Our friends were truly very ready to give, but they at that point had no means to do so.  

Interpretation matters.  Two days after Christmas, and the feast of our Lord’s birth, and one day after the feast of Stephen, and remembrance of his death as the first Christian martyr, perhaps we could pause, step back, and look, as he have now and then before, at our mode of interpretation.  Not of markets and economics today, but of truth, of faith, of Gospel, of life. We take a New Year outlook.  As we pray together in the New Year, what will be our outlook?  As Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, at least as Luke reports, what shall our own outlook toward wisdom be, not 2006, but 2016?

Errancy

To begin. Your love for Christ shapes your love of Scripture.  You love the Bible.  You love its psalmic depths.  #130 comes to mind. You love its stories and their strange turns.  Samuel comes to mind.  You love proverbial wisdom.  ‘One person sharpens another like iron sharpens iron’ comes to mind. You love its freedom, its account of the career of freedom.  The exodus comes to mind. You love its memory of Jesus.  His growing in stature today comes to mind. You love its honesty about religious life.  Galatians comes to mind.  You love its strangeness.  John comes to mind.  You love the Bible, enough to know it through and through.

You rely on the Holy Scripture to learn to speak of faith, and as a medium of truth for the practice of faith.  Around our common table today in worship, we share this reliance and this love.  The fascinating multiplicity of hearings, here, and the interplay of congregations present, absent, near, far, known, unknown, religious and unreligious, have a common ground in regard for the Scripture. A preacher descending into her automobile in Boston, after an earlier service, listens to this service to hear the interpretation of the gospel.  A homebound woman in Newton listens for the musical offerings, as in today’s duets, and for the reading of scripture.  On the other side of the globe, a student listens in, come Sunday, out of a love of Christ that embraces a love of Scripture.  Here in the Chapel nave, on the Lord’s Day, scholars and teachers and students have in common, by your love for Christ, a love for the Scripture, too.  The B I B L E, yes that,s the book for me.  In this way, we may all affirm Mr. Wesley’s motto:  homo unius libri, to be a person of one book.

But the Bible has a story, too, as James Sanders used to say.  And at points, it is errant.  Not inerrant, but errant.  It is theologically tempting for us to go on preaching as if the last 250 years of study just did not happen.  They did.  That does not mean that we should deconstruct the Bible to avoid allowing the Bible to deconstruct us, or that we should study the Bible in order to avoid allowing the Bible to study us.  In fact, after demythologizing the Bible we may need to re-mythologize the Bible too.  It is the confidence born of obedience, not some certainty born of fear that will open the Bible to us.  We need not fear truth, however it may be known.  So Luke may not have had all his geographical details straight.  John includes the woman caught in adultery, but not in its earliest manuscripts.  Actually she, poor woman, is found at the end of Luke in some texts.  Paul did not write the document from the earlier third century, 3 Corinthians. The references to slavery in the New Testament are as errant and time bound as are the references to women not speaking in church.  The references to women not speaking in church are as errant and time bound as are the references to homosexuality.  The references to homosexuality are as errant and time bound as are the multiple lists of the twelve disciples.  The various twelve listings are as errant and time bound as the variations between John and the other Gospels.

The Marsh pulpit, and others like it, are not within traditions which affirm the Scripture as the sole source of religious authority.  We do not live within a Sola Scriptura tradition.  The Bible is primary, foundational, fundamental, basic, prototypical—but not exclusively authoritative.  Today’s passage from Luke 2 is an idealized memory. of something that may or may not have happened in the way accounted.  It looks back sixty years. It is formed in the faith of the church to form the faith of the church.

If I were teaching a Sunday School class this winter I might buy the class copies of Throckmorton’s Gospel parallels and read it with them.

Equality

You love the tradition of the church as well.  Though with a scornful wonder we see her sore oppressed…John Wesley loved the church’s tradition too, enough to study it and to know it, and to seek its truth.  The central ecclesiastical tradition of his time, the tradition of apostolic succession, he termed a ‘fable’.  Likewise, we lovers of the church tradition will not be able to grasp for certainty in it, if that grasping dehumanizes others.  The Sabbath was made for the human being, not the other way around, in our tradition.  

For instance, the linkage of the gifts of heterosexuality and ministry, however traditional, falls below and falls before the Gospel of grace and freedom.  In Methodism, 2016, the church’s own tradition, the very preaching of the gospel itself, and the rendering of theological truth–well before any moral, or ethical, or societal debate—includes the full affirmation of the full humanity of gay people.  Tradition expands to make way for the gospel.  So, over time, equality triumphs over exclusion.  It is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave…

If I were convening a spring study I would have the group re-read Walter Wink’s old little pamphlet The Bible and Homosexuality for some perspective on tradition and scripture and  change.

Evolution

You love the mind, the reason.  You love the prospect of learning.  You love the life of the mind.  You love the Lord with heart and soul and mind.  A mind is a terrible thing to waste. You love the reason in the same that Charles Darwin, a good Anglican, loved the reason.  You love its capacity to see things, and to grow in wisdom and stature, as Jesus did, according to our gospel today..

A word of caution is in order.  Reason unfettered can produce hatred and holocaust.  Learning for its own sake needs virtue and piety (repeat).  More than anything else, learning, to last, must finally be rooted in loving.   Jesus grew, in Luke 2.  The more he learned, the more he taught.  He embodies inquiry for us today.  Inquiry!

The universe is 15 billion years old.  The earth is 4.5 billion years old. 500 million years ago multi-celled organisms appeared in the Cambrian explosion.  400 million years ago plants sprouted.  370 million years ago land animals emerged.  230 million years ago dinosaurs appeared (and disappeared 65 million years ago).  200,000 years ago hominids arose.  Every human being carries 60 new mutations out of 6 billion cells.  Yes, evolution through natural selection by random mutation is a reasonable hypothesis, says F Collins, father of the human genome project, and, strikingly, a person of faith.

I might have my fellowship group re-read this New Year Francis Collins, the Language of God.  He can teach us to reason together.  

It is tempting to disjoin learning and vital piety, but it is not loving to disjoin learning and vital piety.  They go together.  The God of Creation is the very God of Redemption.  Their disjunction may help us cling for a while to a kind of faux certainty.  But their conjunction is the confidence born of obedience.  In the end, falsehood has no defense and truth needs none.  Nothing human is foreign to us.

Existence

You love experience.  The gift of experience in faith is the heart of your love of Christ.  You love Christ. Like Howard Thurman loved the mystical ranges of experience, you do too.  Samuel, in looking forward, expects to learn from experience, and joyful experience at that. We know joy.  Joy seizes us.  Joy grasps us when we are busy grasping at other things.  You love what we are given morning and evening.

You love experience more than enough to examine your experience, to think about and think through what you have seen and done.

Sometimes, after a decade, looking into and upon experience, we can see things better.  Our failures teach us, both as individuals, and in community.  We learn in our experience the happiness and centrality of giving (yes, there is a year end stewardship nudge here (☺)).  We learn also that, you know, you can do too much for people sometimes.  That is part of the limit purpose of the tithe (yes, again, there is a year end notion at play here (☺)).  

You can trust your experience.  That is part of the meaning of Incarnation.  From a friend, this week, came a gift that sings love of Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience, rightly interpreted, in the voice of one Cardinal John Francis Dearden of Detroit, and quoted in Pope Francis’ very recent Christmas message.  Dearden’s prayer sings out the song of incarnate love.  His is our last word today, as we take a New Year outlook, and remember that interpretation matters:

Every now and then it helps us to take a step back

and to see things from a distance.

The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is also beyond our visions.

In our lives, we manage to achieve only a small part

of the marvellous plan that is God’s work.

Nothing that we do is complete,

which is to say that the Kingdom is greater than ourselves.

No statement says everything that can be said.

No prayer completely expresses the faith.

No Creed brings perfection.

No pastoral visit solves every problem.

No programme fully accomplishes the mission of the Church.

No goal or purpose ever reaches completion.

This is what it is about:

We plant seeds that one day will grow.

We water seeds already planted,

knowing that others will watch over them.

We lay the foundations of something that will develop.

We add the yeast which will multiply our possibilities.

We cannot do everything,

yet it is liberating to begin.

This gives us the strength to do something and to do it well.

It may remain incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way.

It is an opportunity for the grace of God to enter

and to do the rest.

It may be that we will never see its completion,

but that is the difference between the master and the labourer.

We are labourers, not master builders,

servants, not the Messiah.

We are prophets of a future that does not belong to us.

Hear the gospel, you prophets of a future that does not belong to you! And, Happy New Year.

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel

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posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.27.2015 at 11:00 am