This morning we have another present to open, waiting for us underneath our proverbial Advent tree. Last week we opened the first one, wrapped elegantly by our ancient Christian forebears of the first century. (In my imagination, they used fine blue and purple paper and a handsome silver ribbon.) Their First Sunday of Advent gift to us was the insight that even when the world is falling apart, the shared work of cultivating a faithful community, right here, just here, is one powerful way that God mends the world.

Cultivating community is one powerful way that God’s dominion dawns.

We now turn to our second Advent gift. This gift is wrapped roughly, in brown shipping paper and gnarled twine. It does not shine; it doesn’t seem to be cheerful. But it is a gift, nonetheless, so let’s open it.

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Wake up!

Open your eyes. Stretch. Yawn. Stretch again. Roll to your side, take a breath, and lift your shoulders up from the bed. Sit up straight. And then stand. Stand up and walk.

Drink water. Stretch again. Rub your eyes: yes, it is morning. You are not dreaming. You are awake. You are alive. The sun is rising. The day is beginning. The time is now.

Click here to watch a recording of this sermon.

***

Water divides.

Water cuts.

Water carves giant canyons in the earth. Water marks the borders of states and nations, on this side Israel, on that side, Jordan. Water separates one people from another.

We often imagine our beloved dead across the water. We say “they have reached that other shore.” A friend of mine once said that when his family told his grandmother that she had to move into a nursing home, she said “No, I’m just gonna take my cross and cross on over.” Losing her independence felt like a death to her, and so she thought of rivers and canyons, the living all here, the dead over yonder, across the river. She wanted to go home, and she knew that home was now across the water.

Click here to watch a recording of this sermon.

***

My position is wrong.

I’m wrong about almost everything. I think I know who God is, and what God is – and I think I know that those are two different questions, that God is in some sense an object, a Something, but God also is a subject, a Someone. But really – do I know what I am talking about?

I think I know how we should worship, what songs we should sing, which prayers are the best, why bad things happen to good people, and what happens after we die. I think I know whether Grace Church is healthy, and I think I know that Grace Church is healthy. I am pretty sure my congresswoman is a person of integrity, and I think I was a polite and attentive dinner companion last evening. I think I know a lot of things.

But my position is wrong.

Click here to watch a recording of this sermon.

***

“Do you ever look at someone and wonder, ‘What is going on inside their head?’”

This is the opening line of the Pixar film, Inside Out, a colorful animated trip into the mind of an eleven-year-old girl named Riley. When we travel inside Riley’s head, we meet different characters, including Joy and Sadness, and watch as they interact during the upheaval of Riley’s outside life.

You may enjoy – or dismiss – this concept as a cute fantasy, but there is something to the idea that small people, or parts, live inside each of us. Maybe you have said something like, “Part of me wants to apply for that job, but another part thinks it’s a bad idea.” The language of “parts” isn’t just a way of saying something – it may point to how we really function psychologically. Saying “Part of me this, part of me that” also helps you cope with life better. If it’s just a part of me, say, who is erupting in anger, other parts can help soothe him. And my core self — the true Me at the center — can manage every part and build self-aware wisdom.

Click here to watch a recording of this sermon.

***

Don’t lose heart.

Be of good courage.

Buck up, now.

Dig in and stick with it.

Focus on your feet. Take another step. Hold on. Hold onto yourself. (You have yourself to hold onto.) Stay. Stay steady. Breathe.

Now take another step.

If you look up, you could see how far away the mountains still are, out there at the very edge of this wilderness you’re crossing, and you could despair. But don’t worry: you’re not supposed to be all the way to the mountains today. You belong here today. It’s okay. Focus on your feet again. Take another step.

I’ve been having trouble staying asleep.

That’s both a literal fact and a metaphor.

First, the literal fact. These days, if I wake up and the clock says 5:00 a.m., I feel deeply blessed. I made it to 5:00 a.m!! I usually wake up around 2:15, 2:30, 3:40, or on more leisurely nights, 4:15. This has been going on since I don’t really know when … June? May? And what’s to blame? It could be blue screens, sugar, caffeine, being over-tired, for a while I thought it was over-training on my runs. Or it’s the job transition, and my instinctive resistance to the emotional punch that’s coming as I prepare to say goodbye to people I love. (That’s you.)

What is heaven?

This question is definitely as important as the question, “Is there such thing as a heaven?” In fact I think it’s more important. If we are going to spend time and energy wondering about an incredible thing we cannot see, I’d like us to determine what exactly that thing is. So —

What is heaven?

First, the negative definitions. Heaven is not a literal golden city above the clouds. We knew this centuries before airplanes and spacecraft, but they confirmed it, of course. Earth is a speck of sand orbiting an average G-type star on a minor arm of an ordinary galaxy. Heaven as a city above Earth’s clouds? Yes to the vivid metaphor; no to the naïve literalism.

Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it?

In the film “Apollo 13,” one of the astronaut’s wives is taking a shower in her cheap hotel room near Cape Canaveral. Suddenly her wedding ring slips off her finger and drops down the shower drain, out of reach and out of sight. She panics. She was already coping with profound anxiety about her husband’s moon mission, fretting over the fact that he could easily be killed at any point, and so the loss of the ring is unbearably hard and worrisome and sad.

But that ancient Palestinian woman who found her tenth coin – she would not have accepted the loss of the ring. She would have dismantled the whole shower stall if she had to, so determined would she be to recover a symbol of such a vital and essential relationship.

Oftentimes, our spiritual practices, and our prayers, are about control. When I pray for friends as their planes take off — and for myself, when I’m on the plane — I want to control the safety of that aircraft. I pray this: “Help and bless them, holy God, and keep them in your care.” That’s my little airplane prayer. (I change “them” to “us” when it’s my own life on the line.) I am asking God to be in control so that a good thing happens, but really, if I’m honest, I want to be in control. Help and bless these people, holy God. Keep us in your care, holy God. Listen to me! Please do as I say!

But we often have doubts about our spiritual practices, and our prayers – and about God, and the basic idea of a loving creator. Those doubts often arise when we realize, inevitably, that we are not in control. Countless prayers were said by hundreds of people, but my mother still died of cancer. The plane could still go down. Innocent people are killed. Children are killed. Who is in control of all this? If it’s God, then we have many questions for God. But it is most certainly not you or me.

They were watching him closely.

I am sure they were.

He was attending a dinner – a Sabbath dinner, which means there were additional customs in place that everyone is expected to follow. He was a leader, a teacher, a person with a notable reputation. And he was controversial: we’re in chapter fourteen now, in Luke’s Gospel, ten chapters after his own townspeople were so enraged by what he was saying that they tried to throw him over a cliff. By now, Jesus is known up and down the countryside. And he’s making his way to Jerusalem, where he will face his ultimate confrontation, his rejection, and his execution.

So yes, they were watching him closely.

We Christians are about lifting people up. We are about lifting people up, pulling them into an embrace, and drawing them close in beloved community. That’s what we’re about. That’s who we are.

Maybe you’re a little embarrassed to call yourself a Christian in these troubled times. Our public square is populated by many Christians who pointedly do not lift people up, pull them into an embrace, and draw them close in beloved community. So many Christians in our dominant culture are about tearing down, pulling apart, and destroying community.

But that’s not what we’re about. That’s not who we are.

Who are you?

There are lots of tools available for you to figure out who you are.

Do you prefer introvert or extravert, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving? If you sort all those out with the MBTI instrument, you could discover that you are one of sixteen kinds of people.

Or maybe there are only nine kinds of people – reformers, helpers, and achievers; artists, explorers, and loyalists; enthusiasts, protectors, and peacemakers – and you can turn the nine-pointed star of the enneagram in your hands to discern who you are.

Or there are six kinds of friends, and you can use a sitcom from the 1990s to discover whether you’re Ross, Rachel, Joey, Phoebe, Chandler, or Monica. (In this instrument, I come out as Monica, always and forever, with no nuance or ambivalence.)

Around this time of year in 1994, my mother, Nancy Crippen, told me she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. This was by no means the first sign of health troubles for her: as I mentioned in a sermon this past Ash Wednesday, my mother survived several major back surgeries in the 1970s. To treat her severe post-polio syndrome, the surgeons cut her open from neck to hip, more than once, and put her in full-body casts for months at a time. They installed metal rods in her lower back, and in subsequent years she occasionally would let us kids tap her down there to feel the surreal hard-as-a-rock sensation. The arrival of cancer two decades later, then, was not an out-of-the-blue calamity for an otherwise healthy person. But it was scary nonetheless, and I remember crying when she told me.

What is mine and what is yours?

What do we really believe about what we own, and what we do not own?

Let’s begin by looking at a belief I have, a belief that probably seems self-evident and utterly uncontroversial: I believe that the money in my bank account belongs to me. We live in a culture that supports this belief: everyone accepts that this money is mine, and no one else’s.

First, let’s clear something up: Martha wasn’t just doing dishes. Her complaint wasn’t about housework. And Mary wasn’t necessarily her biological sister. This was not a domestic dispute between two women, settled by a man.

Martha and Mary were probably ministry partners in leadership, co-managing a household of faith. Think of them as sisters in the way Jordan and I are brothers in Christ, or our wardens Heather and Luke are siblings in Christ. And notice too that the story begins with Martha – just Martha – welcoming Jesus into her home: perhaps she was alone at the top of the org chart, and Mary was her second in command. They were running the community of faith in that village. Think of their “home” more like Grace Church than your condo.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., knew his bible, and he got it right when he preached on the parable of the Good Samaritan. (He was assassinated one day after he preached on it: all of us seem to be forever traveling the dangerous road from Jerusalem to Jericho.)

You can read Dr. King’s words on the cover of our bulletin, but here’s the thumbnail: the priest and the Levite choose not to help the man in distress for perhaps one or two specific reasons. They may have other priorities (even virtuous priorities!), or they may simply be afraid. But the Samaritan chooses to help because he asks a better question of himself than the other two. In Dr. King’s imagination, the priest and the Levite (incidentally, in our church context, “priest and Levite” would roughly compare to me and one of our lay Eucharistic ministers) –they wonder what would happen to them if they stopped to help, but the Samaritan wonders instead what would happen to the guy in the ditch if he didn’t lend a hand.

What is your mission?

What exactly are you planning to do when you leave this building, or when you log off this zoom call, and begin your new week?

What work or project will you take up in the coming days?

What are you preparing to do that is quintessentially you?

We all have a purpose. We all have something to do, or something to be, that matters. Most—probably all—of us have many missions at once, or different missions depending on the time of our lives, or the experiences we’ve had. I once thought my mission was church music, and so I became an organist and choir director. I wasn’t wrong, exactly, but my mission shifted. Then I thought my mission was couple and family therapy. Again, not wrong, but it shifted again. Then came deacon, and finally priest. But maybe my actual mission is being a good brother. Or maybe I have multiple missions, including priest, brother, friend, husband, companion of dogs. In recent days I’ve thought my newest mission is to save at least one life that is threatened by the destructive decisions of the Supreme Court. But some missions seem less noble, and yet prove their worth over time: I have a mission to keep pursuing the sport of long-distance running, not just because exercise helps me feel good, but because it has inspired two of my friends to pursue their own dreams for physical health, and the three of us keep encouraging each other. I think that makes it a mission.

In April 1991, four months from my 21st birthday, I came out as gay, first to a Lutheran pastor who counseled me, then to friends, then siblings, and then my parents. Finally I wrote a letter to my uncle Ray, my dad’s brother, letting him know.

Uncle Ray was an understanding person. He was a well-read newspaper editor in a small town (Worthington, Minnesota, my birthplace), and he was an accomplished historian. He also had a delightful sense of humor, and a way with writing. His letter back to me did not disappoint. “Damn discrimination,” he began. And he repeated it: “Damn discrimination.” Uncle Ray lamented the difficulty so many people had with sexual orientation in that era – an era all too similar to this one. He assured me that he was an ally.

“In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your children shall prophesy, and your young people shall see visions, and your old people shall dream dreams.”*

Are these the last days? Well, if we think these are the last days, we would not be the first generation to think so. Empires and social orders have collapsed, again and again, across all recorded human history. Each era of peace and prosperity is followed by war, catastrophe, and world-changing upheaval. In such frightening times, it is understandable to think that these are the “last days” — the last days of our political nation; the last days of all that we have assumed, and all that we have known; even the last days of earth’s imperiled ecosystems. Everything seems to be falling apart.

But if these truly are the “last days,” there are a couple of silver linings.