December 14, 10:30am (Kevin Westling)
If we could somehow plug in a laptop to each of our brains – and it won’t be long until it is possible – and we looked at each other’s monitors, we would be surprised to see that we do not all see the same things. Some people’s monitor would be a collage of colorful details, while other’s would be focused upon one giant image that might even be in grayscale. One person would see the pulpit as bigger than it is while someone else would see the altar in dimensions much grander that it measures. On some of your laptops, I would appear as a giant while on others I would be the same size as everyone else, and on still others, I would appear as a little cartoon character yammering away.
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SERMONS @ TRINITY
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Fox News more than C-SPAN
The Rev. R. Cameron Miller
Good morning.
Let me tell you something about the Gospels:
they are not a factual accounting
of historic events.
They are more like Fox News
than they are like C-SPAN.
You get what I am saying?
The Gospel stories,
Luke, Matthew, Mark and John,
are stories.
They are theological stories.
They are narratives.
They are conceptual lenses
through which to understand the world.
We all have them, conceptual lenses;
it is just that most of us don’t know
we are wearing a lens,
and we assume that the way we see the world
is unfiltered,
and that the way we see the world
is exactly as the world is –
instead of refracted through our lens.
If we could somehow plug in a laptop
to each of our brains –
and it won’t be long until it is possible –
and we looked at each other’s monitors,
we would be surprised to see
that we do not all see the same things.
Some people’s monitor
would be a collage of colorful details,
while other’s would be focused upon one giant image
that might even be in grayscale.
One person would see the pulpit as bigger than it is
while someone else would see the altar
in dimensions much grander that it measures.
On some of your laptops,
I would appear as a giant
while on others I would be the same size as everyone else,
and on still others,
I would appear as a little cartoon character
yammering away.
We would be in shock and awe
at how differently one another see just this place.
Given that we really do see the world
through very different lenses,
and presume that our own is the “official version,”
it should come as no shock
to hear that the Gospels are stories,
not some kind of objectively measurable descriptions
of historical events
that unfolded in precisely the manner
in which they were explained.
(And by the way, history is always mythological – there is no un-interpreted history).
I want to show you what I mean
because it becomes very clear as we take the walk together toward Christmas.
Matthew and Luke are the two gospels
that include birth narratives about Jesus.
Mark, John and Paul – the earliest writer –
do not appear to know anything about a significant
event surrounding the birth of Jesus.
They wrote their stories with a very different
narrative from Matthew and Luke.
So the whole idea of Christmas
comes from Matthew and Luke, from their stories –
not from an historical event.
From beginning to end,
Matthew and Luke narrate their stories differently –
though they share the idea,
that the importance of Jesus
appeared even at his birth.
Still they see it through their own,
independent and very different lenses,
delivering profoundly divergent images
upon the laptop connected to their stories.
I am not going to describe in detail those differences
because you can read them for yourselves,
which might be a very nice Advent project for us all.
But Matthew begins,
right from Chapter 1, verse 1,
with his genealogy of Jesus.
In his theologically conceived family tree
consisting of 42 generations,
Jesus is directly related to the patriarch Abraham.
If you don’t know him,
Abraham is considered the original Patriarch
of all three Western religions:
Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
But even more importantly,
for Matthew and his theologically driven history,
he traces Jesus directly back to David…
of King David fame.
Matthew spends a great deal of narrative time
and lush metaphors,
demonstrating that Jesus is royalty.
Through Matthew’s lens,
Jesus is a King;
The King;
the King of Israel;
the new Messiah King.
That is what Matthew’s story is all about:
That Jesus should be viewed,
through the lens of his narrative,
and by other 1st century Judeans,
as King Jesus,
Messiah for all time
and liberator of Israel.
But Luke,
who we heard from today,
and from whose narrative
most of our Christmas images derive,
begins with something else altogether.
At the very beginning of Luke’s story
he describes how God was as thick and busy as bees
in the life of Elizabeth and Zechariah.
Who are they, we might ask.
They are John the Baptist’s mom and dad.
Luke takes a lot of time and words
to spin his narrative around a little Judean family
who turn out to be cousins
with another little Judean family that includes Jesus.
It turns out that Elizabeth’s pregnancy
and John’s birth
are every bit as miraculous as that of Mary and Jesus.
And John’s dad, Zechariah,
is given a whole lot more voice and value
than Jesus’ dad, Joseph.
You may be wondering
what all this has to do with you?
Which would be a fair question,
and I am going to get to it,
but I want to finish with these stories first.
So Luke wears a lens that says that Jesus’ birth
shows he is genetically related to a Prophet –
John the Baptist was THE prophet in those days.
He was like Isaiah or Amos or Jeremiah
and after a long drought of universally acclaimed
prophets in Israel,
everyone in Jesus’ day was pretty excited about John.
Luke’s lens sees Jesus born in the image,
some would say shadow,
of the prophet, John the Baptist.
To Matthew Jesus is royalty
and to Luke Jesus is a prophet.
Both story-tellers go on to reinforce these early
narrative filters throughout the rest of their gospels.
When we put on Matthew’s lens
we see a very Jewish Jesus
meant to be King of Israel to liberate God’s chosen.
When we put on Luke’s lens
we see a Jesus who happened to be a Jew
but was born as a prophet
to expand the ranks of God’s chosen to the Gentiles.
What both Matthew and Luke have in common,
even though royalty and prophecy are very different…
is that God sent Jesus to liberate.
If we were to hit re-wind –
although everything is digital now so rewind
is already an antiquated concept.
If we were to back up 2000 years
and ask what the Gay Hadley poem does,
“If it should come to this,”
what we would understand is that
Matthew and Luke would both say: it has come to this.
It has come to this
and God wants to begin again
with the liberation of God’s people
from the death grip of the Roman empire.
It has come to this
and Jesus was born.
Matthew and Luke
share a calibration in their respective lenses,
that offers them a common view:
that the world is held captive by an empire
that has usurped what rightly belongs to God,
and God is at work
bringing about the demise of that empire.
Let’s try on that lens,
whether or not you want to keep wearing it,
let’s just try it on like a pair of glasses
that don’t belong to you,
and test if we can see anything through it.
The world is held captive by an empire…
that has usurped what rightly belongs to God…
and God is at work
bringing about the demise of that empire.
Hmmm.
The world is held captive by an empire
that has usurped what rightly belongs to God,
and God is at work
bringing about the demise of that empire.
It’s okay if the world looks fuzzy to you
when looking through Matthew’s and Luke’s lens.
But you know,
that is their lens.
In fact, it is Mark and John’s lens too,
although they use different narrative features
to tell their stories.
It is a lens they inherited from millenniums of story-telling – literally, more than a thousand years
of telling an ancient story.
The story was always told with different narrative perspectives
and different narrative features,
just like the ones I pointed out between
Matthew and Luke.
But it is a lens they shared,
and it is a lens that shaped their lives,
and it is a lens that shaped how they lived.
Zoom back here, 2000 years after Matthew and Luke,
and do we share that lens?
The world is held captive by an empire
that has usurped what rightly belongs to God,
and God is at work
bringing about the demise of that empire.
I would bet that if we share a lens,
it is something along the lines of a Darwinian/Capitalist narrative
not an ancient Hebrew/Prophetic narrative.
Through our lens the world looks something like this:
It’s a dog-eat-dog world
in which the big dogs eat the little dogs,
and it’s better to be a big dog.
Hmmm.
It’s a dog-eat-dog world
in which the big dogs eat the little dogs,
and it’s better, way better, to be a big dog.
That has some common features or feel
to Matthew’s and Luke’s narrative,
but it is actually quite different from:
The world is held captive by an empire
that has usurped what rightly belongs to God,
and God is at work
bringing about the demise of that empire.
Better to be a big dog
verses
the world has been usurped from God by a big dog.
Better to be a big dog
verses
the world has been usurped from God by a big dog.
What Matthew’s and Luke’s narrative
wants to know from us,
is whether you and I are agents of that big dog…
or agents of God?
That is what the narrative is asking us.
Now…you may have an entirely different lens,
and that is just fine,
but here we are coming up to Christmas
and Christmas is all about Matthew’s and Luke’s lens.
Of course, some of the big dogs have captured and usurped
Christmas too,
and they have recalibrated it
so that when we look through the Christmas lens
we never see kings, prophets or empires.
What we see instead looks a lot like
Miracle on 42nd Street,
in which the big dogs come out looking like
kind and friendly dogs
that turn out to be very good for us.
But we are here in this little church,
in this struggling dilapidated city
with more poverty per capita
than almost any other city in The United States,
and we are asking one another
to take a peek at the world
through Matthew’s and Luke’s lens.
Again, it may not be your lens at all,
but it is our lens – it is the one we inherited.
You and I don’t have to wear it,
but we do have to take it seriously,
just like we must take our genes seriously.
It is in our blood, this narrative lens,
it is in our genes.
It comes to us from our past,
it is ours.
Rather than deny it,
or ignore it,
or discount it,
or reject it,
or pretend it doesn’t amount to much,
or distain it,
or brush it off as if it is a vestige of that old world that was long ago usurped from God…
that narrative lens
deserves to be taken seriously
and reconciled with our own.
It deserves the opportunity to influence our lens.
It deserves the opportunity to speak in its own voice
at least once a year.
It deserves our taking the time to answer seriously its question to us about whether we are agents of
the big dog or agents of God.
It’s just an old story that wants to be listened to,
we don’t need to be scared of it.
It’s just an old story…
our story.
Let’s try it on this year,
just for fun
and see what we see.
