In Season and Out

still be of value to preachers who follow the lectionary more closely than I did. I have included a table of these correspondences as an appendix to facilitate the use of this collection by lectionary preachers.

Some years ago, the church adopted as its mission statement, “Know Christ; grow more like Christ; go to serve Christ.” There are frequent echoes of the church’s mission statement in the sermons that follow, and the final three sermons in this collection take the three elements of that mission statement one by one. While I have edited the sermons to remove references to particular individuals in the congregation (they were always praiseworthy references, not calling people out!) and other indications of context that might be unduly distancing for the reader, I have not tried to disguise the fact that these are, in fact, sermons that were composed for oral delivery to a gathered congregation in the context of our services of worship. Scripture translations throughout are my own unless otherwise noted.

I have had the privilege of serving as music director under several pastors who were gifted preachers and liturgists, but the style and voice of one in particular has always stood out in my memory as a model to emulate—the Rev. Jeffrey M. Halenza, pastor of Christ Our Hope Lutheran Church since its founding in 1976, with whom I worked from 1990–1995. It is to him, in honor of his ministry and with deep appreciation for his pastoral character and gifts, that I dedicate this collection.

PART ONE

Sermons for Liturgical Seasons

1

“Our Wake-Up Call” (Advent)

Isaiah 64:1–9; Mark 13:24–37

Today marks the beginning of another season of Advent, that period of watchfulness, of renewed waiting, that begins the church year. This Sunday’s readings remind us that the season of Advent is not just about, nor even chiefly about, getting ready for Christmas. Indeed, I’ve long felt that it was rather artificial, Advent after Advent, to act as if we were looking “forward” to Christ’s first coming in humility as a baby born in Bethlehem. Putting ourselves in the position of those who, more than two thousand years ago, were anticipating the coming of a Messiah and acting as if we were yearning for the baby yet to be born has long seemed to me to be a kind of playacting, of holy make-believe.

isaiah 64:1-9 “Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, That the mountains might flow down at thy presence, As when the melting fire burneth, the fire causeth the waters to boil, To make thy name known to thine adversaries, That the nations may tremble at thy presence! When thou didst terrible things which we looked not for, Thou camest down, the mountains flowed down at thy presence. For since the beginning of the world men have not heard, nor perceived by the ear, Neither hath the eye seen, O God, beside thee, What he hath prepared for him that waiteth for him. Thou meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness, Those that remember thee in thy ways: Behold, thou art wroth; for we have sinned: In those is continuance, and we shall be saved. But we are all as an unclean thing, And all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; And we all do fade as a leaf; And our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away. And there is none that calleth upon thy name, That stirret…”

The readings appointed for this Sunday, starting off this Advent, do remind us of that for which we are indeed still waiting, that for which we need very much to get ready—Christ’s coming again in glory.

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,

so that the mountains would quake at your presence. (Isa 64:1 NRSV)

Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory. (Mark 13:26 NRSV)

What I say to you, I say to all: Keep watching! (Mark 13:37)

If we find that Christmas is upon us this year and we’re not altogether ready for it, it won’t be the end of the world. But if Christ’s coming again finds us unprepared, living as people who haven’t been looking for it—well, that’s another story, isn’t it? Advent is our wake-up call to what is coming, to who is coming, rousing us to shake off our sleep and restore our souls to vigilance. And we cannot afford to keep hitting the snooze button on this alarm.

mark 13:37 “And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.”

Preparations for Christmas tend to overwhelm Advent, to bury beneath an avalanche of gift buying, travel planning, cantata preparing, menu mapping, and home decorating what Advent, as a gift of the liturgical year, seeks to give us—a chance to examine ourselves and to realign our lives, both as individual disciples and as a church family, so that we will move this year toward greater readiness to meet our Lord at his coming in glory to judge the living and the dead. So let’s pause together and unwrap these two texts, and see if, perhaps, they might help us to receive this gift of Advent and make the best use possible of it, rather than setting it aside in favor of our Christmas preparations.

Mark 13:26 “And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory.”

The passage from Isaiah 64 really begins in the previous chapter. The prophet tells once again the familiar story of Israel. God showed them great favor, leading them out of Egypt and into the land of promise. Rather than keep faith with God by living as he commanded in his covenant, they rebelled against God and God’s law, so that God brought upon them the punishments that God had promised—destruction and exile. And now things are simply not the way they were meant to be. God’s chosen people are not walking in God’s ways and relishing God’s presence; Israel is not experiencing the promises that had been extended to it. It’s all just wrong. “How can God stand it?” Isaiah asks. How can he not “tear open the heavens and come down” and set everything right, the way it ought to be?

We might ask the same questions—perhaps not on our own behalf (though we have no doubt had our moments) but on behalf of the many who have suffered significantly due to the evil or callousness of others. And we can be sure that the blood of the innocent cries out with these words before the throne of God day and night—“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!”—the blood of a young family killed during a house robbery; the blood of countless children dead or maimed by the violence of mercenaries in Africa or land mines in abandoned war zones; the blood of a young woman raped and killed; the blood of generations who died as slaves; the blood of thousands who disappeared as a totalitarian regime protected its interests against potential dissenters; the blood of those who died simply because others refused to share with them the gifts that God intended for all. Iraqi Christians, refugees from the Islamic State, are crying out this prayer today; a Nigerian Christian woman and her children, whose husband and father was lynched in the street, are crying out this prayer today; Christians in the wake of mass shootings in our own country are crying out this prayer today. How can it be that Christ will not come, that a God whose heart is justice itself should not bring all to account before him?

It’s been almost two millennia since Jesus uttered the words we heard read from Mark’s Gospel today, and he still hasn’t come back. This raises some difficult but legitimate questions. First, if God is going to tear open the heavens, if the Son of Man is going to descend upon the clouds surrounded by the hosts of heaven, why hasn’t he? Second, if he hasn’t in the last two thousand or so years, why should we be concerned—this year or next or the year after that—that he will? How important a compass point can his coming again be for us? Of all the things for which we might spend our lives getting ready, why should we say that this one is still so important that it should be placed at the top of our list of priority events for which to be prepared?

We all need to solve these questions for ourselves. My own solution to the second question is not theologically profound, but one of simple math. I figure that, at the absolute maximum, I have forty or so years of life left (and that’s, in all probability, highballing the figure). If Jesus hasn’t returned within that time frame, I shall certainly go to him before the end of it. And the next thing I expect to see after death closes my eyes is the scene portrayed for us at the beginning of today’s reading from Mark 13:

The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven. (Mark 13:24–27 NRSV)

It won’t much matter to me how much time elapses between death closing my eyes and the last trumpet opening them again. Jesus’ coming again is, for me, at most the rest of my lifetime away.

As for the first question, it seems to me that God will only tear open the heavens and come down when one of a few possible conditions has been reached. One condition would be that God has seen positively accomplished on this earth and in the human story all that he wants to see accomplished, such that there is no longer any good left to come from delaying. Another condition would be that God has given up hope on humanity in general and sees that his church has exhausted its ability or its willingness to mediate his deliverance further to the people of this world, such that there is no longer any good left to come from delaying. The day on which God chooses to “tear open the heavens and come down,” when the Son of Man will be seen “coming in clouds,” will indeed at last mean justice for every soul, bringing to each either vindication or condemnation. But every day on which God does not tear open the heavens means opportunity for every soul.

I’m not speaking here just of an opportunity to “get saved” or “accept Jesus” or any such pale shadow of what God seeks from each one of us. I mean here an opportunity to do the work that our Lord has entrusted to us—to each one of us as a disciple, to all of us as a congregation, and to all congregations together as the global body of Christ.

Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake. (Mark 13:32–37 NRSV)

This last sentence is one point in Mark’s Gospel where we find Jesus himself thinking beyond his immediate circle of hearers—namely, his disciples who have gathered around him on the Mount of Olives for this teaching—and thinking about the many who will hear him through them. We can almost see and hear Jesus at this point speaking to us, looking past his disciples and directly into the camera, as it were, to deliver this admonition to us: “Keep awake!”

The question for us in this interim is not, “How long will it be?” or, heaven forbid, “Can we figure out exactly when it will be?” It is also not, “Why isn’t God doing anything to help? To make things better? To make it easier for us to believe and to invest ourselves in his work?” The question for us is: Are we doing the work that Jesus has entrusted to us, like servants who hope to be found faithfully and diligently doing that work when he returns? Or are we doing our own work, attending to our own agendas, seeking our own interests, making up our own list of things to do each day that have little or nothing to do with the work that God has laid upon us to do? Servants cannot afford to act that way; servants must attend first and foremost to the work the master has given them and then to their own interests only as time permits—not the reverse.

When Christ comes, he will encounter each one of us as either part of the problem or part of the solution in regard to the ills that beset this world. There will be no middle ground—and those who stand on the sidelines watching the ills that beset the world, shaking their heads and complaining that God isn’t doing anything about it, are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

What, then, is the work that the master has laid upon us, to occupy us in this interim? God wants for us to know him, to live fully in relationship with him and in response to him. God wants for us to grow into the people that he is re-creating us to be through the working of the Holy Spirit in our midst—to be changed from self-centered and self-driven people into other-centered and Spirit-driven people whose joy it is to do what pleases God. God wants for us to go out to bear witness to and extend his kingdom, his hope, his love, his provision, his justice everywhere that there is need. We can say so much about the work generally; each one of us has to discern our particular tasks toward attaining these ends. Scripture is an indispensable and inexhaustible resource for us in this process of discernment. Every page reveals something about the character, the heart, the driving passions of the God we serve. Every page reveals something to us about the character, heart, and driving passions of the people that Jesus died to empower us to become. Every page has something to say about how to invest ourselves in real-world actions that will advance what God wants to accomplish through us.

Jesus’ word to us this Advent, Jesus’ word to us today, is that those who wake up to understand and pursue these things, who refuse to be as one asleep to God or to God’s purposes for us any longer, are indeed favored. He invites us to renewed

David A. deSilva, In Season and Out: Sermons for the Christian Year (Bellingham, WA: Lex

“A Messiah Nobody Expected” (Advent)

Luke 1:68–79; Isaiah 11:1–5, 10–12

Our New Testament reading today is known as the “song of Zechariah.” Luke introduces this as a prophetic word spoken by Zechariah, uttered as he was moved by the Holy Spirit. It is a deeply poetic expression of hope for what was happening in Israel as a result of God’s activity in Zechariah’s own family. Zechariah, as you may recall, was a priest in Judea, and his wife Elizabeth was also born into a priestly family. They were getting on in years, and Elizabeth had not been able to have any children—not until, that is, the angel Gabriel appeared to Zechariah while Zechariah was burning incense in the temple. Gabriel told him that his wife Elizabeth was going to conceive. In nine months, she would bear a son, whom they would name “John,” which in Hebrew means “God has shown favor.” Zechariah said, essentially, “Yeah, right. Why should I believe that?” Gabriel replied, “I’ll tell you what; I’ll give you a sign. You will be mute, unable to speak another word for nine months until what I have foretold comes about.” This, in turn, prompted the “song of Elizabeth,” an exuberant hymn of praise to God that has not been recorded in Scripture.

Zechariah now knows that his own son is going to be special, having been announced by an angel as very few babies had been announced in Israel’s history. Six months later, cousin Mary comes to visit the pregnant Elizabeth with surprising news of her own—she, too, is to bear a son, about whom the same angel, Gabriel, said even more amazing things:

He will be great and will be called the son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever—there will not be an end to his kingdom! (Luke 1:32–33)

Zechariah has three more months to ponder these things until Elizabeth comes to full term and gives birth to their son. At the baby’s circumcision, with all the family gathered around, Elizabeth announces that the child will be named “John,” as the angel had instructed. The extended family has trouble with this, since it’s not a name in the family, so they go to Zechariah and make signs to him to find out what he wants to name the baby. He reaches for his writing tablet and writes down, “His name is John.” Actually, the first thing he probably wrote down was, “Really? Sign language? I’m mute, not deaf, you idiots!” Nevertheless, when he fulfills the angel’s word by naming his son “John,” he is able once again to speak, at which point he shouts in a raspy voice his celebrated hymn of praise:

May the Lord God of Israel be well spoken of,

because he took an interest in, and worked redemption for, his people.

He raised up a horn of deliverance for us in the house of David, his servant,

just as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old—

deliverance from our enemies and from the hand of all who persist in hating us,

to show mercy toward our forebears and to remember his holy covenant,

the oath that he swore to our father Abraham,

that he would grant us, once rescued from the hand of our enemies,

to serve him fearlessly all our days, doing what is holy and righteous before him.

And you, child, will be called a prophet of the Most High,

for you will go ahead of the Lord to prepare his paths,

to give knowledge of deliverance to his people

in the forgiveness of their sins through the deeply felt compassion of our God,

by which the Dayspring from on high has taken an interest in us

so as to shine light upon those sitting in darkness and in death’s shadow,

to guide our feet into the path of peace. (Luke 1:68–79)

In this song, Zechariah says that God is doing great things for Israel, raising up a “horn of deliverance” for God’s people. This is an image that has long since ceased to communicate, but in the literature of ancient Israel a “horn” was a symbol of strength and ascendancy. In a number of texts, it is specifically connected with the Davidic king and with God’s restoration of David’s line of kings:

The LORD will judge the ends of the earth;

he will give strength to his king

and exalt the horn of his anointed. (1 Sam 2:10 ESV)

There I will make a horn to sprout for David;

I have prepared a lamp for my anointed. (Ps 132:17 ESV)

This seems to be Zechariah’s expectation as well:

He raised up a horn of deliverance for us in the house of David, his servant,

just as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old. (Luke 1:69–70)

But what was Zechariah really expecting? What was Zechariah looking for in a Messiah, God’s Anointed One? I dare say that he had no expectation of seeing Mary’s child nailed up and dying on a Roman cross; he had no expectation that his own son, as the forerunner and herald of this Messiah, would end up imprisoned and beheaded by a king not from David’s line—Herod Antipas, a Jewish puppet king propped up by Rome whom Jesus would leave on the throne of Galilee alongside the Roman governor ruling Judea.

We have the benefit of looking back on Jesus and his messiahship from a vantage point almost two thousand years after his resurrection from the dead. We have the benefit of centuries and centuries of rereading the Old Testament and seeing from beginning to end what we now think of as “prophecies” about Jesus, about the kind of deliverance that Jesus accomplished for humanity, and about the shape that his messiahship would take—a process that, according to Luke, started with Jesus himself as he walked with two of his clueless disciples on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection:

In Season and Out: Sermons for the Christian Year (Chapter 3: “A Mother for God’s Son” (Advent) (Luke 1:26–38))

“A Mother for God’s Son” (Advent)Luke 1:26–38It is said of Jewish mothers that they typically think of their sons as God’s gift to the world. Mary was one Jewish mother who could legitimately make this claim. It has been my experience that Protestants don’t give much attention to Mary apart from the season of Christmas with our nativity scenes that minimally include Joseph, Mary, and the Christ child (ox and ass sold separately). I think that we Protestants largely avoid Mary because a lot of us are squeamish about the level of attention that our Catholic sisters and brothers give her.Mary, of course, is a figure of central importance in Catholic theology, liturgy, and spirituality. She is often depicted in Catholic art enthroned in heaven alongside Christ; she is routinely asked by worshipers to intercede with God the Father and with her son Jesus on the basis of the position she is believed to occupy as “queen of Heaven” and on the basis of the relationship that she still enjoys with the glorified Christ as his mother. Based on the almost universally shared Christian conviction that Jesus was God the Son in human flesh, our Catholic and Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters will speak of Mary as the “Mother of God,” which, while we Protestants would have to concede that this is technically true, nevertheless makes us profoundly uncomfortable.In reaction against all of this, we tend to ignore or diminish Mary, probably erring too far in the opposite direction. I have heard Protestants object: “Mary was a sinner like us whom Jesus would have to redeem, an ordinary woman like any other.” While I regard the first statement to be true, I think that the second is not. Mary was an extraordinary woman who, in yielding herself in obedience to God’s will and in embracing her Son’s mission, shows us a great deal about the heart of the genuine disciple. She also had to become an extraordinary mother to love, nurture, and support such an extraordinary Son on such an extraordinary mission—one that would cost her most of the natural joys that mothers might expect of their children.This Scripture recalls for us the familiar story of the annunciation, the angel Gabriel’s appearing to Mary to tell her what God would accomplish through her in the Son that she would uniquely engender and bear. While we think of the virgin birth in terms of the miraculous and wonderful significance of Jesus as Son of God, we should never lose sight of the cost that accompanied Mary’s embracing her role. When Elizabeth, Zechariah’s barren and aging wife, became pregnant, she declared that God had taken away her reproach among her neighbors (Luke 1:25); when Mary became pregnant, it could only have brought her reproach.We might not appreciate the importance of Mary’s assertion, “I do not ‘know’ a man” (Luke 1:34). Sexual purity was the indispensable element of a woman’s virtue and honor in Mary’s world. One example will have to suffice. A century or so before Jesus, an anonymous Jew wrote a historical romance about a woman named Judith, who became the savior of her city and ultimately of the Jewish people by seducing an enemy general into a drunken stupor and cutting off his head. Her first words when back in the city with the general’s head in her knapsack? “I only seduced him with my looks. He committed no sin with me, to defile and shame me” (Jdt 13:16). Having delivered her city from a desperate siege, Judith still couldn’t let anyone think that she had extramarital sex to accomplish it.Mary was about to sacrifice her reputation for the sake of serving God’s design for deliverance. The Gospel according to Matthew gives more attention to the unwelcome consequences of the angel’s good news for Mary. While Joseph, her betrothed, might have planned to break off the engagement as quietly as possible so as to spare Mary any unnecessary shame, coming to full term as a single mother would have nevertheless brought a great deal of unavoidable shame in first-century Judea or Galilee. One wonders about the extent to which first Mary, then Jesus, had to endure taunts regarding his irregular birth. Mark remembers the villagers of Nazareth asking one another in response to Jesus’ sermon there, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” (Mark 6:3). Matthew would render this differently—“Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary?” (Matt 13:55)—but Mark may preserve something closer to the real thing. To be called “the son of Mary” is quite a significant thing in a village where every male takes his father’s name as an identifier (think of “Simon Bar-Jonah”—Simon, son of John—or “Jesus Bar-Abbas”—Jesus, son of Abbas). One wonders if John’s Gospel doesn’t preserve some reflection of this as well when those with whom Jesus finds himself in an argument about whether or not they are truly Abraham’s children say: “We weren’t born from fornication” (John 7:41).Mary valued God’s promise enough—what this child would become and what this child would accomplish for God’s purposes in the world—to endure the shame that was likely to come. This cannot help but foreshadow for us the very posture later taken by her Son—who, “for the sake of the joy set before him, endured a cross, despising shame” (Heb 12:2). It would be a posture that many in the early church would have to imitate in order to follow Jesus, that many over the centuries—most numerously in the twentieth and twenty-first!—have had to imitate. But