Sermon for Transfiguration Sunday

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on February 15, 2015
Scripture text: Mark 9:2-10

When we talk about God’s laws as recorded in the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, we see a curious mix of pragmatic rules for living and seemingly arbitrary rite and ritual that presumably helped to bring the ancient Hebrews closer in some way to their God. I would argue this perspective, which is somewhat commonplace among Christians, is a little misguided. There is actually a lot pragmatic about the rites and ritual laws too.

For instance, the ancient Hebrews and their modern descendants in the Jews are told to avoid eating certain foods. We call these rules the Kosher laws. It is, however, not coincidental that many of these foods (particularly in ancient times when sanitary practices were unknown) are notorious for carrying food-borne diseases. Those seemingly arbitrary rules were actually quite helpful.

The truth is, there is a pragmatism to all of God’s law, including those that are not obviously so. The commandment “Thou shalt not make a graven image” may not seem to be very practical or pragmatic. But there is a reason behind it. God is, of course, transcendent. In many ways, unknownable. No one truly knows what he looks like or even if he has an appearance as we understand it at all. But for us humans, we don’t deal well with that. We connect best to the tangible and the concrete. Things we can see and touch and understand with our own senses and minds. Hence, we are often forced by our own needs to break this commandment, to create images of God, shrines to the divine, and other tangible things that allow us to relate to that which is, in many ways, unrelateable.

The danger however and the practical reason behind the commandment is that we can forget that the image, the icon, the idol (as it were) represents but a mere fraction of the true deity behind it. God is always bigger than we imagine him to be.

And that brings us to the mountain of the Transfiguration. Peter and the other apostles are given a first-hand experience of the transcendent unknownable God. They hear his voice. They stand in his presence. And, as humans are wont to do when they have such experiences, they want to find a way to make sense of it. Thus Peter suggests that they memorialize this wondrous moment in time by the creation of a shrine. The full deity of God made manifest in Christ Jesus happened here. Probably a lot more impressive than all those places George Washington supposedly slept.

But it’s the wrong answer to this moment. It’s the wrong answer because what Jesus must do from this moment forward requires his humanity, not his divinity. He goes from this mountaintop to Jerusalem. He goes to the cross. He goes to die. And to focus so much on his divine nature because of this moment of transfiguration, Peter and the others have forgotten the whole of who Jesus is.

Forgetting is always the danger of idolatry. We forget the God behind the image and become enraptured with the image itself. We forget the truths behind the symbol. We forget that God is bigger than we imagine him to be. This is the mistake Peter makes when he suggests they enshrine this wondrous transcendent moment. They would come to focus on the symbol, not on God.

How often do we today fall prey to this error? Given how often Christians become obsessed with institution and tradition, quite a bit. Arguments over church buildings. Debates over who can receive sacraments or serve in the office of ministry. Fights over things because of what some dead former member or long-departed pastor would have wanted. All these happen in the church with some frequency and they are all a form of idolatry. Anytime the words “We’ve never done it that way before” or “So-and-so would have wanted...” are spoken, there is idolatry at work. We lost sight of the truth in the shadow of a symbol.

We are called to remember that God is not a tradition or a building or an institution or a memory. God is always bigger than we imagine him to be. And that’s a good thing. We called into the worship of a divinity that crafted the very substance of the universe, from the smallest atom to most vast galaxy. We called into the worship of a God who loved his creation so much that he became a part of it, incarnating as a human being named Jesus of Nazareth. In the wonder of unknownable mystery, Jesus was both fully divine and fully human and out of love that has no bounds, he went to the cross to do the one thing gods are not supposed to be able to do. He died and he died for us. And then, on the third day, Jesus rose again to life, become the first human, the first of us, to be granted that gift. The first, but far from the last.

In a logical scientific universe of the tangible and the material, there is much about this that makes no sense. But that’s part of the point. God is more than our tangible universe. God is more than we can understand. And he knows that. God has given us things to help us know him. He has given us a church and symbols and rituals that we can comprehend (even if we must remember that truth is greater still than these things). He given us sacraments and his story in the form of the Holy Scriptures. And he’s given us himself, found in the form of a humble carpenter’s son born in the ancient middle east.

In our ingenuity, we may unlock many of the secrets of our tangible universe. How it was made. How it works. But we will never figure out the whole of who God is. But God has told us what we need to know. He loves us, he made us, he died for us, he rose again for us, and he will bring us to him. That is no mystery. Amen.

Sermon for Contemporary Worship (5th Epiphany)

Preached at St. John's Lutheran Church, New Freedom, PA on February 8, 2015
Scripture text: Matthew 14:13-33

I make a pretty open secret about how much of a nerd I am. I was the kid sitting in the lunch room at school surrounded by charts and graphs that somehow, in the complexity of Dungeons and Dragons, represented an elf or a wizard or a knight in shining armor. I was the kid who could name the ten brightest stars in the night sky in order (not anymore). I was the kid who know the fictitious corporations that manufactured the X-wing and the TIE fighter in the Star Wars universe. No wonder I never had dates in high school.

Well, some things have changed, but much hasn’t. I’m still a nerd at heart. I’m still the guy that will still occasionally quote some icon of nerd-dom in my sermons. There’s a reason for that and that’s because truth can sometimes be found in the most unlikely of places. Life is full of surprises, full of the unexpected, and often times the great literature of my youth reflects that.

The Lord of the Rings has been one of my go-to texts for this sort of thing and there’s also a good reason for that. J.R.R. Tolkien, the author, was a very devoted Roman Catholic and his faith seeps into the story just about everywhere. The heroes of the tale are the diminutive hobbits, fantasy people who stand barely waist high on a normal human. They are small, often overlooked, and not taken to great deeds of strength and glory. Which is the point. Tolkien understood that it is often from the least that great things come. That was a lesson he learned from his faith.

And one of the texts that teaches that lesson is our Gospel lesson tonight. The crowds have gathered in vast numbers and Jesus, as is his wont, has taken to teaching them his wisdom. The lesson is not a short one and the hour grows late. This triggers a crisis. Matthew fastidiously reports that this crowd numbers over 5000 people (Only the men are “counted,” as was typical of ancient patriarchy. The crowd is likely much larger.) Regardless, the disciples have only their own meager fare, barely enough to feed themselves, let alone the immense number of people who have come to see Jesus.

Jesus, for his part, is not worried. When the disciples come to him to demand that he dismiss the crowds to the surrounding villages to find food, Jesus turns the tables on them by telling them to host the crowd themselves. That triggers a panic. “We don’t have enough.” You can just imagine Jesus shaking his head, taking hold of the five loaves and two fish, and grumbling something about “Oh, ye, of little faith.”

And then the miracle happens.

Christian author Michael Card calls Matthew’s depiction of this famous story as an “unmiraculous miracle” and there’s a lot of truth to that. There is no magic here. No spectacle. No fanfare. There’s no “watch this” gotcha moment. Jesus simply takes the meager food the disciples have and by divine mystery makes it enough to feed the immense crowd. From the least comes something great.

This dynamic continues in the second part of our lesson tonight. The crowd is satisfied with their meal, Jesus dismisses them, and then sends the disciples on ahead of him in a boat while he seeks a private moment to pray and recharge. Partway through the night, Jesus rejoins the disciples who are halfway across the Sea of Galilee struggling against the wind.

As before, reality as we typically understand it is little hindrance to Jesus. He walks across the water to the disciples boat, who being semi-rational human beings are unable to comprehend what they are seeing. They panic for the second time in these two stories, believing Jesus some manner of phantasm (I did say “semi-rational”).

However, once Jesus reassures them, something else remarkable happens. Peter, perhaps because he has learned at least in part the lesson of the loaves, ask to come out to Jesus on the water. Now consider this for a moment. This is Peter, a fisherman. He’s a disciple of Jesus, but as his boisterous and often misguided commentary towards Jesus’ statements indicate, he’s still got a lot to learn. No straight A student this guy.

But that’s also part of the point.

Jesus commands Peter to come and out onto the water he goes. Peter, the loud-mouthed knuckle-headed disciple, walks on water himself. From the least comes something great.

Jesus teaches time and again that just because something seems insignificant to our eyes does not mean it is so to God. He is the one who declares that it is the “meek” who will inherit the earth. He is the one who claims that faith as small as a mustard seed can move mountains. He is the one who welcomes children and claims the kingdom belongs to ones like them. And here in back-to-back episodes, he makes a tiny meal feed thousands and grants a bumbling but enthusiastic disciple to do the impossible.

Elsewhere in the Scriptures, it is claimed that “nothing will be impossible with God.” Here, in these two miracles we see how true that is.

Never underestimate what God can do. Faith is, at its core, trust that God can do what he says and will do what he says. When Jesus says to the disciples, “give me your food” the assumption is that it will somehow be enough and sure enough, it is. When Jesus says to Peter “come” the assumption is that he will not let Peter sink and even when Peter does just that, Jesus is there to take hold of him and to keep him slipping below the waves.

So, when Jesus says from the cross that he forgives us, what does it mean? When Jesus says that he will give us life and give it abundantly, what does it mean? From the world’s perspective, we’re not much. Just a small number of ordinary folk gathered together in worship on a Sunday night. But to God, we are a miracle waiting to happen. From the least comes something great. Amen.

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on February 8, 2015
Scripture text: Isaiah 40:21-31

When I am reading the Scriptures, either for study or for prayer, I am often on the lookout for what I somewhat jokingly call “summary passages.” These are texts that summarize the whole message of the Bible down to a handful of verses. There are a number of these throughout the Bible, many of them you know: John 3:16, Romans 6, Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 13, etc. Most of them are from the New Testament however, which often leads us to a frequent mistake. We can forget that Gospel, that good news, can be found in the Old Testament.

In some ways, it’s easy to see why we make that mistake. After all, the OT contains significant portions of historical material and history which, as a general rule, is often bloody and violent. God’s law as articulated in the books of Moses seems harsh and cruel to modern ears (although, in comparison to more contemporary legal codes, it’s quite lenient.) And the vast majority of the prophets are called forth to address some manner of misbehavior, some way in which the Chosen people have again strayed from their appointed tasks and need to be brought back into line with often vivid descriptions of the consequences of their actions. There’s a lot of negativity in the OT. There is.

That’s not always a bad thing. After all, life can be a bit bloody and ugly. Life can be negative. Life can be unpleasant and harsh. And I like the fact that our Holy Scriptures do not shy away from the ugliness. The people of our book live in the real world, just like we do.

But life also has joy and it has peace. It has happiness and laughter. It has triumph. And the Old Testament has these things too. And we often find them in those handful of “summary passages” found not just in the words of Jesus or Paul or some other disciple, but in the words of someone who only lived in the hope of a Messiah yet unborn.

(Consider this an unapologetic endorsement of DeviantArt)

And that brings us to the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah’s something of an outlier. First off, I should make a point of clarification. There is not one prophet Isaiah. There are three and not all three of them may be named Isaiah. But their time of prophecy spanned a roughly 150 years from before the Babylonian invasions of Judah to the fall of that empire and beyond. Way too much history for a single human lifespan.

But what binds this prophetic book together is not an individual, but rather a theme. Here in Isaiah, we find the hopeful prophet. Only occasionally does Isaiah slip into the usual fire-and-brimstone routine of his peers. What we find instead is a timeless message of hope and trust in God, a commentary in many ways on the Old Covenant itself.

It’s as if these three men over the course of these decades are telling the people, “Yeah, the world is chaos right now, but remember what God said to Abraham? Remember the promises he made? Let me tell you what that will look like.” The whole book is exposition on God’s vision for the world. And if you want OT summary passages, texts that tell the whole Gospel in just a handful of verses, Isaiah has them in abundance.

Isaiah 40 is a classic example. This is the beginning of the prophecy of our second Isaiah and what a wondrous stuff this is. The chapter begins with a text we often hear in Advent. “Comfort, O comfort my people, so says our God.” And it moves from that beautiful prophecy of the Christ into the passage we have today.

Isaiah pleads with his audience to remember what they already know. You’ve heard this stuff before, he reminds them. Remember what God said to you in ancient days. Remember the promises. God is an everlasting god. He will give you strength. He will lift you up. He will empower you and you will rise up as on the wings of eagles.

This is one of those texts where I sometimes wonder why I even bother with a sermon. It preaches itself. I’ve told you many of the things in this sermon so far for your own education. Your inspiration comes far better from the words of Isaiah unfiltered than does from anything I could say from this pulpit.

I guess I’m admitting this isn’t much of a sermon. But maybe it doesn’t have to be. Maybe what I need to do is what Isaiah does here. Remember! Remember the things God has told you. Remember the hope that it gives. Remember the salvation that has been promised to you.

Life is what it is, and it is often that chaotic turmoil from light to dark, happy to sad, easy to difficult. As we get tossed about, it can be easy to forget that our lives are in God’s hands. We see the menace of threats, both real and exaggerated, and we forget that God is greater than these. We feel small and insignificant in the grand scheme of the world and we forget that it is the meek and the powerless that God lifts up. We forget so much.

The prophet calls us to remember. Remember who we are and whose we are. To remember that God calls us by name. That God will not let one be missing. That God gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless. That God will lift us up as on wings of eagles. This is a promise that he made to a sheep-herder in ancient Chaldea, a covenant that said that from that one simple man would come a blessing that would shared among all the peoples of the world. That blessing is Christ and we are his. Remember that. Amen.

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on February 1, 2015
Sermon text: Mark 1:21-28

There was a recent study concerning substance abuse that made some rather remarkable and unexpected findings. It was a two-step process. The first step involved animals, rats I believe. They first put a rat in a tiny cage, with little light, no activity. Attached to a cage were two dispensers, one for food and one distributing some manner of stimulating drug. Unsurprisingly the rat hitting the dope and got high.

They put another rat in another cage, only this time there was one of these wheels that they could play and exercise on. They gave it good lighting and better food and again the two dispensers, one that good food and the other with the drug. This time, the rat played on his wheel, basked in the light, ate the food, and hardly ever touched the drugs. Again, perhaps not surprising.

But the shock came when they took the rat from the first cage and put it in the second’s cage. The scientists figured it would hit the drugs like mad, now that the poor animal was addicted. But what happened was the first rat played on the wheel, basked in the light, ate the good food, and hardly ever touched the drugs. The addicted rat chose the alternatives when those alternatives became available.

The scientists asked themselves, “Does this apply to humans?” Well, they looked at several social studies of human behavior and substance abuse and saw a lot of parallels. They found happy well-adjusted human beings typical do not have issues with substance abuse, even when such substances are readily and easily available. They also found that people having difficulty with jobs, relationships, mental illness, depression, poverty, and other social ills were far more prone to abuse drugs, alcohol, pornography, etc. Again, no real surprises here.

But then they decided to do with people what they did with the rats. They took a group of folks that were struggling with addiction and gave them better opportunities: improved jobs, better health care, more income, marital counseling, etc. They expected these addicts to maintain their drug habits, but like the first rat in the second cage, they stopped doping up almost completely, even enduring the pains of withdrawal to do so.

It wasn’t the drugs that caused addiction, the study concluded. It’s not the people involved and their moral fortitude or lack thereof. It’s “their cage,” the circumstances of life in which they live.

We often use the phrase “demonic” to describe the devastation addiction causes in addicts and the people who care for them. It’s fitting. There is something viciously evil about it. But what if we’ve misidentified the source of the evil? What if we’ve gotten it wrong all this time?

Jesus has his own encounter with the demonic in our Gospel lesson today, one of many throughout the Gospel accounts. He goes to the synagogue as is his custom on the day of worship and there he encounters a “man with an unclean spirit.” Mark is his usual hurried self in telling the tale. Jesus commands the spirit to leave, it goes, the crowd is astonished, the end.

Time and time again throughout the Gospels we see this sort of story. Jesus encounters a demon-possessed person and he (and we use this phrase somewhat flippantly) sets them free. He commands the demonic to go and it goes. He destroys the cage that has imprisoned these poor people. He sets them free.

We live, in this day and age, in a demonic society. We are imprisoned by greed, poverty, lust, hatred, disease, sorrow, and a whole host of other evils. And those prisons, those cages, demand and define our addictions.

• The stockbroker convinced his happiness is tied to his bank account with continue to accumulate more and more money until he has more than he could ever spend in a lifetime and yet he still craves more.
• A homeless man who has nothing will seek out anything that gives him a moment’s respite from his misery. The oblivion found at the bottom of a bottle is sweet release.
• A lonely boy convinced no one will love him and a young woman damaged by sexual abuse will do whatever they can to feel loved, even if it means obsessive viewing of the lurid images of magazines or the Internet or throwing themselves into the arms of whoever’s willing.
• A person convinced the difficulties of their life is the fault of some other will relentlessly pursue a personal agenda of hate and anger against any and all who remind them of their imagined enemy.

I could go on, but we see this all around us. We see people addicted to drugs, to sex, to obsession, to rage, to food, to money, and they will do anything they can to feed their addictions: lie, cheat, steal, even in some extreme cases kill. And sometimes, we are those people and they are us. We too can be the rat in his tiny cage, doing anything we can to escape the nightmares, real or imagined, of our lives.

All too often, we think of sin as a moral failing. It is that, but it is also more than that. It is also the circumstances of our lives that drive us to make those choices. It is also our cage. Sins are the things that life does to us as much as the choices we make. That’s the reason we use the language of captivity quite often here in church when speaking of sin. We are “in bondage” to sin, for instance, in our confessional prayer.

Every morning, we wake up to discover life is finding new and innovative ways to kick the crap out of us. And each night, we return to our beds with new scars from the battles we’ve fought. Sometimes, those scars impact our thoughts, our feelings, and our behaviors. It twists us into becoming the things we resent. Sin begats sin and find ourselves deeper and deeper in that dungeon.

Jesus offers an alternative: freedom. His kingdom, his reign, is the ultimate expression of the deepest desires of the human soul. A place of acceptance, compassion, peace, and liberation. Time and again, he reveals this kingdom to us in his ministry, saying in so many variations to people caged by demonic forces “Let them go.”

“Let my people go.” The clarion call of Moses is echoed in the work of Jesus. Perhaps that is what the people sense in their astonishment at his teaching. A new liberator has come, one here to set us free from all that enslaves and imprisons us. One that will break the bondage of sin, death, and evil. One that has the power and authority to do what we cannot do: Make us free.

This freedom comes with a price, but it is not one that we are called upon to pay. Christ himself goes to the cross for our liberation. Christ offers up himself to break the bonds of sin and death, to loosen our chains. This is why he came. The cross is not merely a crude instrument of torture and death, but the avenue that shatters all that holds us captive. Only he could do it. Only Jesus could endure its cost for our sakes. But endure it he did. He gave all so that we could have our heart’s greatest desire: freedom. Amen.

Sermon for the Third Sunday after Epiphany

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on January 25, 2015
Sermon texts: Jonah 3:1-10, 1 Corinthians 7:29-31, Mark 1:14-20

The game developers have figured out a new and innovative way to keep us playing their video games. It’s a new strategy, a new technique, that they’ve incorporated into nearly every new and popular title that’s come out recently: They make you wait.

Really! That’s their plan. They make you wait. For instance, in my World of Warcraft game I have to build up my garrison to continue the game. It takes something like 2000 resources to do that, but I only get about 100 or so a day. So I’ll spend the next several days waiting. My new starship in my online Star Trek game took three weeks or so days to get, since I could only farm so many of the resources needed for that each day. I can only play about five rounds of Bejeweled Candy Blitz Saga before I have to wait until tomorrow (or pay more money. My choice.)

A wise man once commented that the old school video games from yesteryear are a lot like life. They get harder and harder until you die. Now the new ones reflect another unpleasant aspect of life. They make you wait.

I hate waiting.

I know, I’ve heard it all about how patience is a virtue. But there are just some things in life no one wants to wait for. The sunny vacation in the Bahamas? Who wants to wait for that? That brand new car? Who wants to wait for that? That hot date with your beloved? Who wants to wait for that? These are things we want now. We’re kids on December 1st, hungry for and eager for Christmas to get here. Darn it, why do we have to wait?

Life is hurry up and wait. And yes, while we say that patience is a virtue, I disagree. Patience is a necessity, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it.

We are not alone in that. I spoke last week of how God is often surprising and unexpected. What you say if I told you that God is surprisingly impatient? He wants things now too and doesn’t want to wait for them. That’s certainly the feeling I get from all three of our Scripture texts today. God is a hurry. He’s in a “terrible rush,” as our friends in Britain might say. But what is he in such a hurry for?

Well, to answer that, let us look at texts with some detail. We’ll begin with Jesus. We’ve heard this story before. It’s the tale of Jesus going by the seashore to call his first disciples. Today we have Mark’s take on those events, which contributes to our sense of urgency. Mark shows us a certain hurriedness to Jesus’ mission. Jesus hits the ground running and doesn’t stop until he’s done.

“And immediately...” Biblical scholars tell us that if we’re reading a mystery Bible text and it has copious uses of the word “immediately,” it’s a safe bet it’s from the Gospel of Mark. Jesus never catches his breath. Everything that happens seems to happen immediately after the previous thing. It’s like Mark is scripting an action movie version of the Gospel with a rapid pace and a level of excitement. But behind that excitement is a certain impatience. Jesus has an important job to do here and he wants to get it done.

These fisherman disciples are part of that important job. Think about for a second. If you want to get a task done quickly, one good strategy is to share the load, to bring in others to help you. In a lot of ways, that’s what Jesus is doing here. The world needs to know his message. The world needs to know him and if he just does it all by himself, it’ll take forever.

Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Some thirty years later, we see one of Jesus’ disciples (admittedly not one of those at the seashore) still at it. Paul writes to the church in Corinth and he’s lost none of that urgency. Look, he tells his audience, salvation is nearer now than it was before. It’s coming soon. We’ve got to get this done. We’ve got to tell people about what God is doing, what he’s done. The whole world needs to know and know now.

Hurry up. Get busy. There’s only a little bit of time left.

But what is it that God is in such a hurry to do? What is it that he is so eager about that he just can’t wait anymore? Jonah holds that answer. His story is also one of rushing and hurry. Get to Nineveh. Of course, we all know that story too. Jonah’s not quite as eager as God is and he takes a boat going the other direction, spends some time in the digestive tract of a large sea creature, and then gets barfed up on the Assyrian coastline. But once all that’s done, God comes to him again with this hurried message. Go to Nineveh and tell them. Jonah does, the city repents, and then God gets to do what he’s wanted to do all this time. What he always wants to do. What he hungers to do for everyone.

He shows love and mercy.

The things we are impatient about are the things that excite us the most. The things that excite us the most are things about which we feel the strongest, that we care about, that we are passionate about. No one is impatient for the doldrums of life. We’re impatient for the thrills, the pleasures, the best things that our lives offer. The things we love. The people we love. God is like that too.

He’s impatient because he loves us. And he’s so very eager to show that love. He wants to forgive. He wants to bless. He wants to embrace. He wants us. We are what gets God excited. He’s impatient to be with us. That’s what he hungers for. That’s what Jesus’ mission was about, to bring us together. Us and God. God and us. That’s what salvation is. That we are with him and he with us. That’s what he wants. That’s what God desires most. And he hates waiting for it.

I remember when Sarah and I were dating. We were a long distance couple. She was here in York and I was in the mountains of WV and we would to see each other twice a month or more as we could. I remember how much I looked forward to those times, how impatient I was for her to get to me or me to get to her. Those sorts of moments still happen even now that we’ve been married for almost 7 years. They happen because I love her. They happen because I want to be with her. And if God feels anything like that...well. who am I kidding? God feels something infinitely greater than that for all of us. No wonder he’s impatient. He loves us beyond reckoning. He wants to be with us. And that’s what Jesus came to make happen. And through his life, his cross, and his empty tomb, he made it so. Amen.

Sermon for the Second Sunday after Epiphany

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on January 18, 2015
Sermon texts: 1 Samuel 3:1-20, John 1: 43-51

It’s likely no surprise to anyone here that I spend a lot of time on the Internet. I usually use it for legitimate purposes: sermon research, news browsing, communicating with friends via email and Facebook. You know, a lot of the same things many of you use this wonder of technology for. And yes, that also extends to looking at cat pictures and memes.

I was on one such website earlier this week, one I typically use to view pictures of cars like Maserati, Bugatti, Aston Martin, and various other brands that I will never ever own on a pastor’s salary. Interspersed with the car photos are various other pics that you might typically find on a “Guy” site (nothing too risque, however), including the occasional humorous quotation. And I spotted one that both made me laugh and slam my hand down on the table and say “I have my sermon for this Sunday.”

It was a picture of a billboard. On it was written, “Well, you did ask me for a sign. God.”

God does have a sense of humor and the Scriptures are truly filled with stories that are truly ridiculous, bordering on slapstick. God is always doing the unexpected, the surprising, and what’s probably the funniest is that God warns us about this. He tells us countless times that he does not view life the way we do. He does not judge the way we do. He does not evaluate the world the way we do. God’s ways are God’s, not ours, and yet despite all those warnings, we still get caught flat-footed all the time.

That picture on the Internet just seemed to me to be the precise sort of thing God would do. You want a sign? Well, here’s one. Just not the one you expected.

Samuel, the subject of our first lesson today, gets two such surprises from God. They’re almost pranks. The first is our first lesson, when Samuel is a boy and God surprises him by coming by night. Samuel keeps running back and forth to Eli because he doesn’t realize what’s really going on here and there is something funny about how he just doesn’t get it. But that’s not the only time he doesn’t get it.

At the other end of his life, he’s called to anoint the new king. So Samuel goes to the household of Jesse. And God tells him outright, “Look, I’ve sent you here to anoint a king, not the next Hollywood star. It’s not about height or good looks or strength or any of those things. It’s about the heart and soul of the person.” But Samuel is still astonished that the one chosen by God to be king is the ruddy runty little David instead one of his tall statuesque brothers. He doesn’t get it then either.

God does the unexpected. The surprising. Now he’s got a good reason why he does this to us. It is humorous, but it’s less a belly laugh than it is something akin to satire. It’s designed to make us think and re-evaluate the way we look at the world.

Jesus is himself, in a sense, a joke. Something unexpected. Something surprising. Something to, of course, make us think. Consider the birth narratives, the Christmas story. That story is nonsense. This is the king of kings and lord of lords. His birth is heralded by visions and angels, by portents in the sky, and he’s born in a barn.

Folks, if you don’t think that’s ridiculous, you’re not paying attention. I know it’s familiar to all of us, perhaps too much so. The whole premise of Christmas is nonsense. And it’s meant to be. That’s the joke. The one that makes us think. The one that makes us re-evaluate what we think about the world.

And then we come to Nathaniel.

The Scriptures don’t tell us a whole lot about him. The lists of the Twelve Disciples in the synoptic Gospels do not mention him, leading some to believe he’s either not one of the 12 or he uses another name. This story from John is the only tale we have about him, but it does tell us a few things. “Saw you under the fig tree” is likely a euphemism. Biblical scholars speculate that may mean that Nathaniel is a reader and therefore likely a Rabbi, well versed in the Scriptures. If that’s true, then he really should know better than to be surprised that the Messiah is someone unexpected. But like Samuel before him, he doesn’t get it.

“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

Well, that’s the joke, isn’t it? Nazareth is this tiny little backwater town and yet indeed that is the home of the Messiah. Just like the greatest king of Israel’s history was not some Schwarzenegger-like Adonis, but a short pipsqueak named David. Just like the liberator of God’s enslaved people was an exiled murderer named Moses. Or the first to proclaim the core message of the Gospel, that Christ is risen, was woman of potentially questionable background named Mary. God is not what we expect. Nor does he act as we expect him to.

He doesn’t play by our rules. And that’s the Gospel. It’s a surprising thing. Jesus goes through the whole of his life upending people’s expectations. But the biggest surprise at all comes at the end of his life. His greatest moment of triumph? His ultimate victory? It’s to die a vicious brutal death on a cross. You want to talk about something that doesn’t make sense to us? Something that has to be a joke? The greatest human being that ever lived dies like a worthless hated criminal. And yet, that’s not defeat. That’s the greatest victory humankind has ever known.

And who saw that coming?

God is not what we expect, nor does he act as we expect him to. He’ll keep doing that to us. We’re constantly the butt of his jokes because we just don’t get it. He’s lives in a backwater called Nazareth. He’s born in a barn. He dies an ignominious death and yet it’s a victory. But the biggest surprises are not the elements of his life on Earth or the stories of God’s interaction with his people. It’s the way he responds to us.

He knows everything about us, including the things we’re too ashamed to admit even to ourselves and yet he loves us beyond words. He knows how often we’ve broken his laws and hurt other people, and yet he showers us with blessings uncounted. He is fully aware of our every vice, our every mistake, our every nasty habit, and yet he wants to be with us. And he wants that so badly that he even endured the cross for us. You want to talk about the unexpected? The surprising? God loves me. God loves you. And he died and rose again for the sake of us all. Amen.