Epiphany 3 C Luke 4:14-21

I've talked about money a lot this week to different poeple in different contexts but all in a professional setting, all in the role of pastor, all for the sake of the church on earth. That is never a comfortable thing to do in fact just starting my sermon out this way I can see a few people bristle just a little. It is uncomfortable to talk about money, especailly when the church is an organization that runs on donations and is therefore often in the uncomfortable position of asking for it, at least implicitly, at least by passing out offering envelopes, reporting budget shortfalls or passing the plate around. And believe me it makes me uncomfortable to talk about money I mean who I am to ask anyone to give anything to anyone else? And frankly it makes people unhappy, sometimes downright angry to hear someone else talk to them about their money, especially about using their money in a way that doesn't get them more money. It makes them mad.

But everyone can breath out now, I wasn't talking about money this week to try to fill a budget gap or increase overall giving and that isn't what I'm going to talk about now. I talked about money a lot this week in the same way that I talked about money a lot the month that Katrina hit New Orleans and the week that that the earthquake hit off the coast of Indoneasia causing a giant Tsunami that killed about 225,000 across about 15 countries. I talked about money this week in the same way that I talked about forgiveness and understanding the week of September 11th. I talked about money this week the same way that I talk about new life when someone dies. I talked about money this week the same way that I talk about thankfulness when someone is born.

I talked about money this week because people kept talking to me about the earthquake in Haiti, kept asking what God is doing. What is God doing to help those poor people and the answer is working at incredible rates to bring healing by using Christ's body on earth, us. Using our genorsity, our love, our prayers, our care, our concern, our excess, our abundance, our hearts. And one of the easiest ways for us to give all of that is by donation, hence all the talk of money. People in this country and in a lot of others are doing a great job of giving what they have and it always amazes me, no amazes isn't the right word, perhaps reminds me, that God is at work in the hearts of people when terrible things happen, using us to bring healing to our broken members. God is working through us, right now today, to bring healing to a broken people.

In the gospel lesson today Jesus takes a scroll, as if he were to pick up the bible and he flips through it and he finds a passage from Isaiah and he begins to read. A great passage, filled with hope for a dying people, a people exiled from their homeland, a people who had fallen to the armies of at least two other countries, a passage that promises release for the captive, sight for the blind, protection for those in danger and healing for the broken. Jesus choose that scripture to read. Read it and then sat down to teach the people. And he told the people that that scripture had been fufilled in their hearing. That Day, that day God's annointed was there to proclaim release to the captive, sight to blind and life to the dying.

People were with Jesus up to that point but as soon as he said that he kind of lost them. In fact he didn't just lose them, he made them angry. They were so angry that they ran him to a cliff side with the intention of throwing him off. I think it is safe to say that he offended them or worried them which is odd because as you hear what Jesus is saying, I've come to declare freedom to the captive, sight to the blind and healing to the broken it seems like pure good news, words of life. He is in his hometown here and we often blame that for the strange response but I think if that is the case they really overreacted. They still wouldn't have wanted to run him off a cliff. I think that perhaps their problem with what Jesus said was that it didn't sound like good news to them.

It was a text written for broken people, people with problems, people who had been driven out of their homeland, people who had lost entire generations to war and hunger, people who had incurred the wrath of God and needed to be let back into the promise of the gospel. They were not that kind of people and how dare Jesus, who was one of them, compare them!

This is why what Jesus was saying was radical and different and why it tended to insight such a strong angry reaction. People didn't have a sense that the suffering of someone else mattered to them. As long as they weren't suffering they were content to believe that they already had the favor of God. They believed a lot like Pat Robertson if any of you heard his appalling comments about Haiti, believing that when something bad happened it was a result of some wrong action by the party that it happened to. So in a way Jesus was telling them they were part of the bad things that were happening to other people.

Likewise, Paul says in his letter to the Corinthians that we read today that we are all part of one body. Each of us as Christian people, as people of God, are connected to each other. No escaping it he says, just like your eye can not suddenly declare itself a separate entity from your body and even if it does that doesn't actually make it separate, it doesn't make you stop needing your eye and it doesn't me the eye stop needing the you.

The way this plays out for us it means that if someone is hurt in some way because we are all part of one body in Christ we are all hurt and therefore all responsible for helping to heal the brokenness, just like if a part of your body is hurt your whole body works to compensate and to heal the hurt part. It could be in the case of those who sat around and listened to Jesus teach that the Lord's promise for healing, liberation and wholeness for all, made them think more about this responsibility for others and less about God's love for each of them as individuals.

You see the hard news about being part of a body of believers is that we are always part of the whole body of Christ in all things that that body experiences and it is always our duty to care for our other parts. That is what it means to be people of God. It doesn't always feel like good news. Sometimes it feels uncomfortable like when you ask where is God in terrible tragedy and you are told to look at what your own hands are doing in the midst of that tragedy.

But the flip side of that, the gospel part of it is that we are always part of the whole body. And that means that wherever we are, whatever is happening to us, with us or around us the rest of the body is still connected to us, still holding onto us, so knit together with us that

when we move it moves,

when we hurt it hurts

and when it comforts, we are comforted.

Nothing can ever seperate us from the whole body of Christ and therefore from Christ Himself. This is scary news, this is hard news, this is good news because it is life-giving news for us and for the whole body. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Epiphany 2 C John 2:1-11

In our gospel story today we hear about Jesus and his mother attending a wedding. a wedding feast really. In Jesus' time wedding feasts lasted for at least seven days. There were seven days of celebration with wine and feasting and most of the wine and food for the feast came from guests, for wedding presents a friend of the groom's family would provide wine for the feast. We don't really know why the wine ran out at this wedding, perhaps more people showed up than they thought would or the guests consumed more than usual. Perhaps the guests didn't give as much as was expected. Whatever happened the wine gave out and this was disgraceful for the father of the groom, for the groom himself, and for the whole family involved in the wedding. And it was worse than just a bad sign for the bride and groom. And in a time when community and connections were what defined a person this lack of wine that was supposed to be provided by friends, in short, made it look like they had no friends, like they were abandoned by their friends.

So, when the wine ran out Jesus' mother begged him to do something. Then she left the scene. She told the servants to do whatever Jesus told them to do (in faith that he would do something). And he did, he with seemingly little effort, transformed a great deal of plain water into wine he saved the celebration.

Up to this point in the gospel of John Jesus had not yet performed any miracles, at least none that we know of, no healing, no walking on water, nothing...So why this one? Turning some water into wine for a party seems kind of trivial. Kind of like a small thing for a first miracle, very much a human concern.

Something unique about this miracle, though, is how it is done. Jesus tells the servants to fill up several large clay jars with water. And so the servants went and filled these empty jars with water. Normal everyday water. In the area and time that Jesus lived in most of the water was unfit to drink. So the servants filled up the jars with water that was even unfit to drink.

Now we don't hear anything else about what happened in or with the jars except that suddenly there was wine to serve and it was good wine, great wine, wine fit to be served at the beginning of the celebration when the best wine is brought out. Through the power of the Holy Spirit the plain unfit water was transformed into the most fit wine.

All it took was water and the Holy Spirit.

This sounds familiar to us because we profess the transformative power of baptism, claiming that great things will come simply from water and the Holy Spirit. We faithfully bring infants up here to the font and using water as a sign of God's love wash away the brokenness into which they were born and declare to them a new and transformed life in Christ.

At its core baptism is really an affirmation that through the love of Christ, through his baptism, death on the cross and resurrection we have already been transformed.

When I think about transformation and baptism I think of birth of a baby that happened here, very, very long ago. 150 years ago in fact, long before any of us were here.

I don't know many details, almost zero really, this happened to a family who long since moved on from Castleton but it was in the records, our record books were recently translated and computerized, a mostly straightforward job but in just a few places were little notes , extra information about a birth, baptism, wedding or funeral.

So we know a baby was born here back around 1860. But not just a normal baby, a baby born out of wedlock, a little bit of a scandal in present times but a punishable event 150 years ago when the note is from. At the very least a community could certainly shun a mother and child born under such circumstances. The could be kept out of churches and homes, left out of the community. And at least if you pushed away the family member who brought this shame you could be separated from it a little, keep your good name for the most part.

So the family, specifically the grandparents of the baby, heads of the family has a choice to make. And it had a lot to do with how they were going to handle something at church. Baptism. Baptism for a child in such circumstances wasn't a given. In fact in some churches it still isn't. They could have just stayed away and kept their shame from being very public. And so in the midst of what must have been some pretty intense family drama, as time grew close for the child to be born as they had to start sharing the news with people, as the pastor came to visit about how they would handle the whole thing publicly, Grandma and Grandpa had to do some soul searching while their daughter waited in fear, standing to lose the only family she had and with a very difficult road ahead of her.

Wondering if they would distance themselves from their shame and her? If they would publicly reprimand their own daughter and not claim their grandchild? Wondering if she had locked herself and her new baby son out of their love and God's forever.

It came time for the baby to be baptized.

So there on a delicate old baptism page in our book, written in old german, barely legible is a little group of words after the mother's name and in place of a father's name. It is written in the handwriting of the pastor but the words didn't come from the pastor alone.

It says:

though the child has no father, it is the desire of his grandparents, mother and father to his mother that the record show that he is welcomed into the family and into God's family with love and forgiveness. And his mother is held in that same love.

The family came to the conclusion when it came time to baptize that God's Love wins out over all. But they didn't stop there, they had a note entered, one of a handful over the nearly two century history of this church, pretty rare. And a tiny note but one that, because baptism was an issue, affirms for all the world now and ever, love and forgiveness and we have to assume healing:

The wanted the world to know that despite all the circumstances this child is welcomed with love into our family and the family of God.

This transformational love is the promise of the gospel, the reason for Jesus' acts of power and mercy and it is what we proclaim in each baptism that we perform and in every child of God that we welcome in the name of Christ.

Because of the promise of their own baptisms a community of God was able to welcome a child born in shame and because of the declaration of God's love in his baptism this little child, forgotten by history now, unable to talk, walk or even hold his own head up yet had spread the good news of God's love and forgiveness to his grandmother and grandfather, aunts, uncles, his entire church.

All it took was water and the Holy Spirit.

Turning water into wine seems like a funny miracle to mark the very beginning of Jesus' ministry. No one's life depended on it, no one in the affected family even asked Jesus to be involved. It was a family problem with, hopefully, a family solution. But that is what makes this the perfect first act in Jesus' ministry. The family didn't somehow try to make it worth Jesus' while to provide for them. They didn't have to prove themselves, Jesus saw that they were in crisis, that their relationships were in question and with great mercy he shared God's grace with them.

Jesus' ministry was defined by transforming peoples lives through the gospel, by healing the sick and calling the faithful. This is the continued ministry of the church today, of us here at Trinity and of all children of God. To spread the free gift of transformation in the form of water and the Holy Spirit.

How great it is to know that whatever our concerns, be they great or small, whether they seem trivial or earth shattering we are loved and blessed by the Lord who was concerned with an everyday wedding feast and the birth of a child out of wedlock.

Surely this same Lord is concerned with each of us, with our joy, pain, fear, hopes, gifts and dreams. How great to know that because of this concern we have already been transformed into beautiful, sparkling, worthy children of God who were welcomed at the font and who will be welcomed at the great high feast.

All it took was water and the Holy Spirit

Thanks be to God
Amen

Advent 4 C Luke 1:39-55

Several years ago as a student in seminary in California. I climbed into a 15 passenger van with another adult and 13 teenagers and joined in a caravan with two other similar vans filled with all kinds of sleeping bags, water, snacks and pulling trailers filled with building supplies. We drove through the beautiful hills of Northern California, past sprawling vineyards with huge mansions overlooking valleys that look like they came out of someone's dreams. Through Los Angeles with its brights lights and people feeling so entitled that they jog in $200 workout suits in the midddle of the street, past Disneyland and Knotts Berry Farm, through San Diego where the beaches look like they are pulled straight out of the movies, across the border into Mexico. First into the touristy parts of Mexico, the parts where Californians go to spend time and money, then the parts where real Mexicans shop and eat and then breathtakingly quickly into the slums. Into a neighborhood where stray dogs wander around looking like skeletons and people live in kind of permanent lean-tos made of whatever they have to make them out of, mostly trash from up north, from Americans, old garage doors are very popular because they are big enough to make whole walls with.

We were there to build houses for two families. We had collected money and building materials for a year and these kids were using their spring break and when we got there the slum stretched as far as the eye could see in any direction. Two houses, two simple 12ft by 12ft rooms really that whole families from grandma on down would live in seemed tiny all of a sudden compared to all of the need and pain and dirt and sickness that we could see.

But we had come so we started to build, our work was magnified you might say, made bigger and more useful by some well trained volunteers who lived in this place year round, and some local laborers who donated their time. My group built for a family, headed by grandma, with three adult women and three little kids (dads travelled around to find work)...we would build our twelve by twevle room for them, with windows to the outside but no internal walls and they would use it as living space and still cook and at least some of them sleep in the hobbled together shack that was already on their tiny little piece of land. I remember being up on the roof sweating with the kids as we nailed shingles down thinking how badly I could use some water, it was HOT there and seeing grnadma, tiny old woman lugging two huge jugs of water into her home and refusing the offer of help from one of our group. Off and on while we were there I saw her doing similar things, certain stuff she just wouldn't take help with.

After about four days we finished the house, it was tiny but tidy and sound and we were proud and amazed at what God had done for us and what we had done for God, maybe a little too proud of ourselves really. And we were going to the house the last morning to do a little service of blessing, I worked with some of the kids who knew a little spanish and together we patched together a little prayer service with very pretty carefully choosen words. To thank God for this house that God had built with our hands.

But when we got there for the service grandma had other plans, she had made food for us and found chairs for us all to sit in, i guess he had borrowed from neighbors. All the water and other thigs that she was carrying in and wouldn't take help with had been to make us a feast of thanksgiving, down to the water that she had had to pay for because though the locals could drink it, the water there wasn't safe for us to drink. So carefully she had prepared a meal that was safe for us and must have cost her quite a lot and as we prepared to eat she waited patiently as we did our little prayer service and then she said she wanted to say a prayer. It was short and in spanish. My spanish wasn't great then and is even worse now but I remember what she said was basically translated to mean: Let us thank God because with you he has made my heart and soul very, very full.

Nothing we could have said would have been a better pray, I thank God because with you he has made my heart very, very full, we heard sitting in an empty room that would be a whole house, in the slums, where people lived on the trash from our country, looking at a tiny grandma who the world couldn't see, would never see because she was just to small to matter to anyone but God and because of that to us. And she prayed for us because God had made her heart very, very full.

In the gospel lesson today after being told that she will be mother to the messiah in the form of a little baby Jesus, a terrifying task, Mary says: My soul magnifies the Lord. This song from Mary is called the magnificat, a latin word that comes from the word that she uses for what her soul does, it magnifies the lord. We don't use the word magnify like this very often in fact we almost only use it now when referring to science and technology microscopes, magnify things, tiny things, things that we would never see otherwise to make them life size, even large, there are huge TV screens in some labs where tiny, imperceptible things, things that would never be seen by the untrained eye, are magnified and then projected up so that everyone can see them on huge people sized screens. Magnification makes tiny things, that would be completely missed, into full pictures, in some cases very, very full just so they can be seen.

Magnify isn't a word that we use a lot to describe what we do or who we are or what it means to be Christian but isn't it really just what we do? Lift up, magnify, the little ones, as Jesus calls them, those who would otherwise be left completely out, not even noticed by the untrained eye?

In fact our job is to look in places that other people might never bother to look and to magnify the Lord by lifting up those we find there.

For Mary I suppose this worked both ways, she was at once very small herself, a young unmarried peasant woman, without a lot of money or an important name, just a girl by all accounts and yet when she got the crazy news that she would give birth to the messiah instead of running to hide or going to the temple, which was in certain ways like a palace and demanding special treatment or rejecting the whole thing and trying to come up with a plan to save her own butt, she welcomed God's son, a tiny baby, just like her, just a boy, who would not even have been seen by the untrained eye. And she sang praises to God for all of it, magnifying His amazing race with her very full heart and soul.

One the other hand God magnified Mary's soul through the words of the messenger sent to her to announce the Good News, through her cousin Elizabeth, through the baby John, still in the womb but a prophet who leapt for joy at her arrival, through Joseph who took her in and loved and cared for her despite his doubts, through kings and wisemen, shepherds and lowly cattle herds. Mary was lifted and held up, She might have gotten the song that she sang wrong, in fact, when she said her soul magnifies the Lord because I think that the Lord and all the faithful servants magnified her soul.

Or maybe it worked both ways. Maybe it still does, our souls, our little faith that would't even be seen by the untrained eye is magnified in the community of the faithful and by Christ living amoung us and then we in turn sing praises and remember the great good that has been done for us in God's name from a cookie after service to miraculous birth death and resurrection of God's only son for us and our hearts magnify the Lord right back for all to see and empower us to fill the hearts and souls of others with God's love. This is great good news. Thanks be to God. Amen!