Grand Opening
Sermon
Sermons on the Gospel Readings
Series III, Cycle B
Object:
Carefully the plans are laid. The property is purchased, the foundations are poured, the combination of bricks and sticks are put in their proper places, so that, after weeks of work and waiting, the building begins to take shape. Then, when the building is completed, a merchant makes his appearance on the scene, having long since made his purchasing plans and placed his orders for the first selection of goods to be offered to his anticipated customers. The empty store shelves and racks fill with merchandise. Months of dreaming, planning, and building finally come to fruition. One day, there is a grand opening, where for the first time the good merchant offers all his labor as his gift to the community, and hopes that the community will respond by purchasing enough from him to allow him to make a living.
Much as the months before the opening have been exhausting work, they have all been months of preparation. Only after the opening has the time for action truly arrived.
Do you recall the torch ceremonies that take place at the Olympics? Mile after mile, country after country, even continent after continent, the Olympic torch comes to the location of the games. It is a torch of anticipation, an advent torch; it isn't the main torch; it is a vehicle for the flame, a transport, bringing the fire from Greece to the Olympics. It is, in a way, a John the Baptist torch, not being the light itself, but bearing witness to the light that is to come.
Naturally, the time comes when the opening ceremonies, the torch bearing, the lighting, the parading are over, and it is time for the games to begin. The torch, the pageantry of the opening ceremonies are at one and the same time the end of a long road of expectation, the end of expectation and the beginning of participation.
Both of these little recollections are meant to help us see the sense of the new season we are now entering. When Christmas is at an end, we find ourselves in the Sundays reflecting on the Epiphany, the coming of the light: the end of Advent expectation and the beginning of Epiphany participation.
That is the welcome news Paul brought to the Ephesians in his letter. Through the coming of Christ we have become fellow heirs of the promises of God. It means the season of waiting is over, the season of getting on with it has arrived. We haven't missed the boat. We're on the boat. Our task now is to get others on board as best we can.
The beauty of an observation like Epiphany is that, like the traveling stargazers from Matthew's gospel, we may enter the whole drama of Christ's birth now, really for the first time. At Epiphany, the drama of the nativity ceases to be a show with an entirely Jewish cast of characters. We may sometimes have felt empathy with the clumsy poet whose little bit of humorous verse went: "How odd of God, to choose the Jews."1
This provoked an equally good-natured response: "Not odd of God, Goyim annoy 'im."2
Yet, because of the story we share on Epiphany, we may know -- for the first time in the church year -- that God has opened the gospel of salvation to everyone. It would be the most grievous of wrongs to keep this gospel to ourselves, a warm fireside memory of family gathered, tree trimmed, dinner simmering in the oven, as though Christmas was meant to be no more than our own private experience; the coming of the foreigners bearing their load of strange gifts is meant to remind us that the nativity was for the world. We are not only to remember that. We are to help make it come true.
We might take it for granted that the gospel is for the world. We have heard it often enough. But Paul took it to be a mystery, a deep mystery. The unity of Jew and Gentile was no more automatic in Paul's day than the unity of Catholics and Protestants in the one Christ is automatic in many places today. Chasms of enmity stretched between Jew and Gentile in those early churches, chasms not yet breached. The gospel of unity in the birth of this child not only demands preaching, it demands faithful representation before the world.
Any insistence on acceptance of social position over acceptance of gospel demands is treacherous. If we say that this or that kind of person with this or that kind of job, or this or that ethnic background just doesn't feel "comfortable" in our church, this is treacherous. When the churches anywhere in the world practice an official or unofficial apartheid more faithfully than their transit or university systems do, and when Christians anywhere in the world reach for each other's throats over differences between Catholic and Protestant, this is treacherous. It isn't a mere squabble between monks, "only" a religious difference that separates them. It is a public and damning denial before an already skeptical and unbelieving world that the unity of Jew and Gentile in Christ is revealed truth.
The one who was called "king of the Jews" by the magi before their arrival in Bethlehem, must ever after be called "Savior of the world," or it is a futile gospel that we preach.
Paul said, "So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus" (Romans 6:11). The dying to sin is not to be discounted -- it is real. Paul Stookey, of the Peter, Paul, and Mary trio, said that once upon a time the most popular magazine in our country was called Life. That's a pretty broad subject. Then came People. Now people are part of life, it is true, but not all of life. Later came Us, which is a smaller slice yet, since "us" is only part of "people." Ultimately -- we should have been able to predict it -- came the magazine called Self. It is a natural human tendency, this fascination with self.
Christ calls us out of our preoccupation with ourselves, our town, our clan, our worries, our dreams, our hopes, our inwardly directed fretting. All that glorifies self and places others on lesser levels of importance falls away in the face of the gospel of unity between Jew and Gentile in Christ. Dying to sin and self requires just enough that the self-giving love of Christ would live in us. T. S. Eliot's poem, "The Journey of the Magi" reminds us of this fact:
... were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a birth certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation.3
We, too, -- as much as the good news of Christmas has caught on for us -- arrive at the Epiphany, no longer at ease in the old dispensation. Things as they were can never be the same again now that Christ has entered our world. We have held the grand opening, what remains is the task of moving from expectation to participation in the work of the gospel.
When we read Matthew's story of the magi, it is too easy to be distracted by the gifts of the magi. Human gifts can be distracting. God is the only true giver of gifts, given free and clear. What the wise men brought were really thank offerings, a response. The season of anticipation had ended, and the season of participation had arrived. The promise that belonged only to the children of Israel, had been, through this child, offered free and clear now to every citizen of God's world. The magi were the very first Gentiles to have the privilege of discovering this for themselves.
The mundane but always appropriate question we face any time we read the story of the magi is, or should be, "What gift" -- or more appropriately, "What thank-offering -- can I bring?" Sometimes the answer is as near as our own backyards. It is certainly always within our own ability. Consider the story of Earl Miner,4 a rather unspectacular citizen of Marshfield, Missouri, and of the kingdom. Earl decided that he wanted to make a contribution to world peace as his thank offering to the Prince of Peace. So he invented a TRAG, a machine whose name is short for its contributions to transportation and agriculture.
A TRAG is a three-wheeled, eight-horsepower vehicle built from a few hundred dollars worth of materials, that is shipped to people in poverty stricken and roadless areas, serving as a rather ungainly combination tractor and pickup truck. Earl became convinced that people in third-world countries leave rural areas because of a lack of affordable transportation. He gave up his job as a product design manager to work full-time on what he called his "peace machine" which since the mid-'60s has been in service in about 22 third-world countries. For people who still carry their households on their backs and heads, it is a quantum leap forward, sometimes freeing up as many as 100 people for work other than hand carrying. Earl Miner's garage became the worldwide headquarters for the TRAG, and Earl responded to cynics by saying that our hope for the world is for "spirituality added to technology." It seems to me like a gift that would be right at home alongside the gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
What can I do? No matter how much care went into the purchase of those Christmas gifts, the story of the magi reminds us that they are not the final goal. They are just the beginning. As the American poet, Howard Thurman, wrote:
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers
To make music in the heart.5
Amen.
____________
1. Attributed to William Norman Ewer, British journalist (1885-1976).
2. Leo Rosten, (1908-1997), The Joys of Yiddish (New York: Mcgraw-Hill, 1968).
3. http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/291.html.
4. http://www.lightfootcycles.com/historical.htm.
5. Howard Thurman, The Mood of Christmas and Other Celebrations (Richmond, Indiana: Friends United Press), 2001.
Much as the months before the opening have been exhausting work, they have all been months of preparation. Only after the opening has the time for action truly arrived.
Do you recall the torch ceremonies that take place at the Olympics? Mile after mile, country after country, even continent after continent, the Olympic torch comes to the location of the games. It is a torch of anticipation, an advent torch; it isn't the main torch; it is a vehicle for the flame, a transport, bringing the fire from Greece to the Olympics. It is, in a way, a John the Baptist torch, not being the light itself, but bearing witness to the light that is to come.
Naturally, the time comes when the opening ceremonies, the torch bearing, the lighting, the parading are over, and it is time for the games to begin. The torch, the pageantry of the opening ceremonies are at one and the same time the end of a long road of expectation, the end of expectation and the beginning of participation.
Both of these little recollections are meant to help us see the sense of the new season we are now entering. When Christmas is at an end, we find ourselves in the Sundays reflecting on the Epiphany, the coming of the light: the end of Advent expectation and the beginning of Epiphany participation.
That is the welcome news Paul brought to the Ephesians in his letter. Through the coming of Christ we have become fellow heirs of the promises of God. It means the season of waiting is over, the season of getting on with it has arrived. We haven't missed the boat. We're on the boat. Our task now is to get others on board as best we can.
The beauty of an observation like Epiphany is that, like the traveling stargazers from Matthew's gospel, we may enter the whole drama of Christ's birth now, really for the first time. At Epiphany, the drama of the nativity ceases to be a show with an entirely Jewish cast of characters. We may sometimes have felt empathy with the clumsy poet whose little bit of humorous verse went: "How odd of God, to choose the Jews."1
This provoked an equally good-natured response: "Not odd of God, Goyim annoy 'im."2
Yet, because of the story we share on Epiphany, we may know -- for the first time in the church year -- that God has opened the gospel of salvation to everyone. It would be the most grievous of wrongs to keep this gospel to ourselves, a warm fireside memory of family gathered, tree trimmed, dinner simmering in the oven, as though Christmas was meant to be no more than our own private experience; the coming of the foreigners bearing their load of strange gifts is meant to remind us that the nativity was for the world. We are not only to remember that. We are to help make it come true.
We might take it for granted that the gospel is for the world. We have heard it often enough. But Paul took it to be a mystery, a deep mystery. The unity of Jew and Gentile was no more automatic in Paul's day than the unity of Catholics and Protestants in the one Christ is automatic in many places today. Chasms of enmity stretched between Jew and Gentile in those early churches, chasms not yet breached. The gospel of unity in the birth of this child not only demands preaching, it demands faithful representation before the world.
Any insistence on acceptance of social position over acceptance of gospel demands is treacherous. If we say that this or that kind of person with this or that kind of job, or this or that ethnic background just doesn't feel "comfortable" in our church, this is treacherous. When the churches anywhere in the world practice an official or unofficial apartheid more faithfully than their transit or university systems do, and when Christians anywhere in the world reach for each other's throats over differences between Catholic and Protestant, this is treacherous. It isn't a mere squabble between monks, "only" a religious difference that separates them. It is a public and damning denial before an already skeptical and unbelieving world that the unity of Jew and Gentile in Christ is revealed truth.
The one who was called "king of the Jews" by the magi before their arrival in Bethlehem, must ever after be called "Savior of the world," or it is a futile gospel that we preach.
Paul said, "So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus" (Romans 6:11). The dying to sin is not to be discounted -- it is real. Paul Stookey, of the Peter, Paul, and Mary trio, said that once upon a time the most popular magazine in our country was called Life. That's a pretty broad subject. Then came People. Now people are part of life, it is true, but not all of life. Later came Us, which is a smaller slice yet, since "us" is only part of "people." Ultimately -- we should have been able to predict it -- came the magazine called Self. It is a natural human tendency, this fascination with self.
Christ calls us out of our preoccupation with ourselves, our town, our clan, our worries, our dreams, our hopes, our inwardly directed fretting. All that glorifies self and places others on lesser levels of importance falls away in the face of the gospel of unity between Jew and Gentile in Christ. Dying to sin and self requires just enough that the self-giving love of Christ would live in us. T. S. Eliot's poem, "The Journey of the Magi" reminds us of this fact:
... were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a birth certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation.3
We, too, -- as much as the good news of Christmas has caught on for us -- arrive at the Epiphany, no longer at ease in the old dispensation. Things as they were can never be the same again now that Christ has entered our world. We have held the grand opening, what remains is the task of moving from expectation to participation in the work of the gospel.
When we read Matthew's story of the magi, it is too easy to be distracted by the gifts of the magi. Human gifts can be distracting. God is the only true giver of gifts, given free and clear. What the wise men brought were really thank offerings, a response. The season of anticipation had ended, and the season of participation had arrived. The promise that belonged only to the children of Israel, had been, through this child, offered free and clear now to every citizen of God's world. The magi were the very first Gentiles to have the privilege of discovering this for themselves.
The mundane but always appropriate question we face any time we read the story of the magi is, or should be, "What gift" -- or more appropriately, "What thank-offering -- can I bring?" Sometimes the answer is as near as our own backyards. It is certainly always within our own ability. Consider the story of Earl Miner,4 a rather unspectacular citizen of Marshfield, Missouri, and of the kingdom. Earl decided that he wanted to make a contribution to world peace as his thank offering to the Prince of Peace. So he invented a TRAG, a machine whose name is short for its contributions to transportation and agriculture.
A TRAG is a three-wheeled, eight-horsepower vehicle built from a few hundred dollars worth of materials, that is shipped to people in poverty stricken and roadless areas, serving as a rather ungainly combination tractor and pickup truck. Earl became convinced that people in third-world countries leave rural areas because of a lack of affordable transportation. He gave up his job as a product design manager to work full-time on what he called his "peace machine" which since the mid-'60s has been in service in about 22 third-world countries. For people who still carry their households on their backs and heads, it is a quantum leap forward, sometimes freeing up as many as 100 people for work other than hand carrying. Earl Miner's garage became the worldwide headquarters for the TRAG, and Earl responded to cynics by saying that our hope for the world is for "spirituality added to technology." It seems to me like a gift that would be right at home alongside the gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
What can I do? No matter how much care went into the purchase of those Christmas gifts, the story of the magi reminds us that they are not the final goal. They are just the beginning. As the American poet, Howard Thurman, wrote:
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers
To make music in the heart.5
Amen.
____________
1. Attributed to William Norman Ewer, British journalist (1885-1976).
2. Leo Rosten, (1908-1997), The Joys of Yiddish (New York: Mcgraw-Hill, 1968).
3. http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/291.html.
4. http://www.lightfootcycles.com/historical.htm.
5. Howard Thurman, The Mood of Christmas and Other Celebrations (Richmond, Indiana: Friends United Press), 2001.
