What the Heck is a Nazorean

Matthew 2:13–23

Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him." Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, "Out of Egypt I have called my son."
When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:
"A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more."
When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child's life are dead. Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And after being warned in a dream, he went away to the district of Galilee. There he made his home in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, "He will be called a Nazorean."

I remember, years ago, attending worship on the 1st Sunday of Christmas, and being quite bummed to encounter this text.
Sorta negative.
Sorta explodes one’s hope for a continuation of the warm fuzzies that were stirred on Christmas eve.
Is this choice of texts perhaps an almost necessary nudge, to raise our eyes from our own selves, and to fix our eyes on the refugee, the lost, the one in need?
I think of a meditation by Al Rogness, Never Alone: he says:

In a profound sense we can never be alone, not even with God. When we pray to him and invite him to come to us, we discover that we have no private party with him. He brings with him all who are his. He also brings with him all who are in need and says: “Whatever you have done for the least of these, you have done for me.” So, as we go to our private rooms or sit alone with God, we sense the vast company to which we belong in him, and we cannot escape those whom the Lord asks us to help and to love.

Incarnation Mystery and Other Big Words

I often wonder at the power of story.

Why do people come to worship on Christmas eve?
Could it be to simply hear and sing the story?
Wm. Loader touches on this in interesting ways. . .

Christmas is a space which invites the coming together of many very significant life issues, but not as issues to be thought about, more as issues of experiencing, frequently unexpressed and inarticulate. That is why we need the angels, the romance, the symbols, the colour of the story. People can enter the story, find themselves there, make their own exploratory or rededicatory journeys with the shepherds, just to see, to be there.
For some who may make the Christmas service their one church visit for the year, perhaps just to be back with family and old friends, the story is still familiar, a mixture of fantasy and faith, an opportunity to engage that latent spirituality which has not found the church rings their bells. The inarticulate spirituality which will sometimes bring children for baptism in a kind of vaguery too often despised. The Christmas story remains a sacred site for very many people inside and outside our churches. Today is the day to encourage people to enjoy it, to touch its sacredness and let it touch them.

May the story of God’s great love for you be proclaimed, heard, felt and lived in your Christmas celebrations.

a story I’ve used often.

There is a story of an Anglican Bishop who was getting his family ready for Christmas Eve worship. On their way to the candlelight service, the son looked at his father and said, "Dad, are you going to let us enjoy this Christmas, or are you going to try to explain it to everybody?"

Explain well!

It's dark and I can't see. Must be night.

Matthew 11:2–11
When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples 3 and said to him, "Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?" 4 Jesus answered them, "Go and tell John what you hear and see: 5 the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. 6 And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me."
7 As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John: "What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? 8 What then did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces. 9 What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. 10 This is the one about whom it is written,
'See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way before you.'
11 Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

A few years ago, the kids were slow to wake up one morning. The oldest was protesting from bed, and the preschooler was complaining about being too tired to be standing there. “I know” the little one said. “I'll check and see if it is daytime." After checking behind the shade, he turned and said "Mom, it's still night!"
It is not hard to connect with John’s question: “are you the one?” “Shall we wait for another?” “Like one who will ACTUALLY bring about the promised new age?”
As a high schooler, in my pietistic naivete, I made a comment to a classmate that I still regret - though my regret is assuaged by my friend’s instructive response. He is Jewish, and I said to him that reading the New Testament, it was hard not to come to the conclusion that Jesus was the Messiah. (Doh!)
What I don’t regret, is the lesson I carry to this day from his response: With a good measure of passion, my friend replied:
“He’s not at all what we’re looking for in the Messiah!”
"Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?"
It is still night, and, from what I can tell, the nights are getting longer, not shorter.
Here’s a marvelous line, I turn to often: Edmund Steimle, in his last sermon on the Protestant Hour:

We are delivered in Christ, not from the darkness, but from its dominion and power to bury our hopes. That, as I see it, is the task of preaching, not to deny the darkness, but to shed light on our paths as we walk through the darkness.

I have a suspicion that in preaching on this text on these short days, that one could work well with darkness, and with John’s disappointment in Jesus - a disappointment that we might all well share.

Mark Allan Powell, in a Word and World article “Matthew as Pastor: The Presence of God” (1998) suggests that Matthew envisions a Church that engages culture in a way not suggested by H R Nieburhr. Let me share the quote

. . . we see now a theological assessment of the relationship between church and culture. As I understand it, Matthew's view on this subject would best be systematized as a model absent from Niebuhr's classic study. Matthew operates with what I would call a "Christ beneath Culture" paradigm, which (as the name implies) is essentially the model that Niebuhr calls "Christ above Culture" stood on its head. Matthew is optimistic about the church's influence in the world, but this influence does not derive from the church's acquisition of power within society but from its repudiation of such power. The church becomes the world's salt and light precisely by remaining powerless. pg. 353

then he concludes the article with this paragraph on pg. 354

. . . In responding to the question, "Where is God to be found in this world?" Matthew inevitably wrestles with what we would call christological and ecclesiological arguments, and struggles as well with the question of how matters of faith affect life in the world at large. The practical problem is how God can be present in a world ruled by Satan. The ultimate answer is that God is present through powerless ones whose continual repudiation of worldly power undermines the kingdom of Satan and portends its eventual collapse. The necessary link to affirming that the Lord of heaven and earth is now manifest in such a powerless, oppressed minority is found in the person and work of Jesus. The community of the powerless — the church — is a continuation of Jesus' embodiment of God's presence on earth. To people who are asking where God is to be found, Matthew points to the powerless Christians going out into the world as sheep in the midst of wolves. Welcome them and the message they bring, and you will welcome the one through whom God is with us; indeed, you will welcome the very God who sent him (10:40).

While that is quite a lot of “stuff” I look at this and wonder if John the Baptist isn’t there to help us all ask the question that pushes us to the cross. I’d rather read Left Behind and find God present in a bunch of dead evil doers. In Jesus, God has chosen to suffer the violence, and invited us to work as God’s agents, beneath culture, beneath violence, beneath power, and to make God’s kingdom present in ways we couldn’t imagine.
"Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?"
Afraid so. . .
Or, perhaps, you will find, that this seemingly bad news is the only Good News there is.
No need to look anywhere else. Jesus is the one, and you are his.
Forever.

Straight Paths

In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, 2 “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” 3 This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” 4 Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. 5 Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, 6 and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. 7 But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8 Bear fruit worthy of repentance. 9 Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. 10 Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 11 “I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

John the Baptist sorta crashes our Advent party here - like the Residence Hall guy making us put our beer away and turn off the music. . . Well, let’s humor him a bit, pretend we’re back on the straight and narrow, and once he leaves the building, we can turn the music back on, and resume the party. . .
Do we need to reclaim repentance today?
Have we always needed to “reclaim” repentance as a true turning to God?
I think - for some odd reason - of this opening paragraph by Walter Brueggemann in his essay “The Liturgy of Abundance, The Myth of Scarcity” Christian Century, March 24, ‘99.

The majority of the world's resources pour into the United States. And as we Americans grow more and more wealthy, money is becoming a kind of narcotic for us. We hardly notice our own prosperity or the poverty of so many others. The great contradiction is that we have more and more money and less and less generosity - less and less public money for the needy, less charity for the neighbor.

I guess this comes to mind because this sounds a call to me to repent. Or maybe, more accurately, because I hear it as something SOMEONE ELSE needs to hear for THEM to repent. Sort of like that Oliver Wendell Holmes quote:

“Humility is the first of virtues - - for other people.”

or John Seldon:

“Humility is a virtue all men preach, none practice, and yet everybody is content to hear. The master thinks it good doctrine for his servants, the laity for the clergy, and the clergy for the laity.”

Could the same be true for repentance?
Here’s something I said in a sermon on this text once.

Yet, repentance is not at all shame or self righteousness. It is, in fact, a receiving and a knowing. It is receiving the love God has poured out for you, and living in that love. It is setting aside the vain pursuits and powers that threaten to undo us, and a following of God.

Maybe the call to repent is fitting for Advent, maybe it is something I want for myself. Maybe John the baptist hasn’t so much crashed the party, as he has set the tone so the party can actually begin.