Leaping in the Womb

Luke 1:39-55

A baby leaping in the womb…being a man I am speaking a bit out of line here I’m afraid.  I have no idea what it would be like to feel the sensation of a baby kicking around in my belly.  I got to feel and see my two children kicking around inside of Dana, and see them born and all that.  But, I was just a very scared and inept observer.  I asked Dana about this but all she said was you mostly just go about the day to day stuff and you marvel a lot.  That wasn’t much help I was looking for some deeper thought because I had this sermon to write.  Anyway, if memory serves what I saw her thinking and doing was more like: “What will this child be like?  Is it healthy?  Can I do this?  Can I eat that?  I really want to eat that?  My hormones are out of wack, look out?  I feel like barfing could you get me some crackers.  Heartburrrrnnnnn!  Pull over, I need to pee again, now!  Can I do this?  Why God?  Wow God!  Umph, this baby must be Chuck Norris.  Wow God!”  A new human life growing inside of you, a part of you but not, that bond…it’s a marvel…a wonderful mystery.  But, it’s not for me to know.  That’s a special gift God gave to women.

With that in mind, think of Elizabeth.  Imagine your child not just kicking inside you, but leaping, and leaping for a reason.  Here’s Elizabeth pregnant way past her safe childbearing years.  She had suffered the label of “barren” nearly all her life.  In her day they believed a woman’s main purpose was bearing and rearing children.  She would have had to deal with a lot of scorn.  And here she was pregnant, just like the angel told her husband Zechariah she would become that day he went into the Holy of Holies to offer incense and then the angel struck him mute when he didn’t believe the good news.

In comes her cousin’s daughter, Mary, probably fifteen coming for that extended visit that young daughter’s of cousins sometimes used to have to make when they got pregnant (said with a whisper).  The baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaps and she is filled with the Holy Spirit and instead of saying, “You poor child.  Everything’s going to be just fine.  You look beautiful.”  All the while thinking, “Mercy me, child.  What were you thinking?”  Instead of all that sappy, Southern politeness she loudly exclaims, “Woman, you are blessed.  Your baby is blessed.  And who am I that the mother of my Lord has come to see me.  Even my baby’s leaping.  Believe that angel, Honey.  You are blessed.”

Now there’s something deeper going on here that we would be remiss not to note.  Both Elizabeth and Mary stand as representatives of two phases of God’s people.  Elizabeth represents the faithful people of Israel.  She has the new life of the greatest of the prophets growing in her womb.  She’s married to a priest and herself of a priestly family, indeed the chief priests, a descendent of Aaron.  Yet, she was barren and shamed.  Elizabeth stands for the people of Israel who sang the lament of Psalm 80. 

Psalm 80 was written somewhere between 701 BC when the Assyrians destroyed northern Israel to sometime just after 586 BC when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple and carried the Israelites away into exile.  It was Yahweh’s doings to kick his people off the Land because of their idolatry and wanton abuse of the poor.  Yet, in the midst of all this wickedness there always was a faithful remnant of Israelites who had had to suffer the fate of their wicked kin without cause.  These faithful innocents are the people who are crying out in Psalm 80: “Restore us, O LORD God of hosts, let your face shine, that we may be saved.”

Elizabeth and Zechariah were such people.  Luke says at 1:6, “Both of them were righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and ethical requirements of the Lord.  Yet, they had no children, since Elizabeth was barren, and they both were getting on in years.”  They were faithful among the priesthood; a priesthood who in that day were largely either politically corrupt, hypocritical, or devoutly legalistic.  Yet, though they were faithful it appeared as though God had cursed them and cut them off from having a future generation.

Mary was a young woman still really just a child, maybe just fifteen.  She was innocent in her own right yet about to be scorned for a scandal that was God’s doing.  Mary, this child, was to be the mother of the God/man, the mother of the new humanity.  Her baby will be Yeshua, Joshua, salvation if you remember last week’s sermon.  Israel’s faithful remnant prayed for restoration, for salvation, and Mary’s child Jesus (Yeshua or Joshua) is that salvation.  He is the one at God’s right hand come not just to save God’s people, but to save God’s whole creation from sin, and evil, and death.

I look around at churches today.  The majority of them grown small, aged, nearly barren of children and I think of Elizabeth and her baby, John – John the Baptist – leaping in her womb.  We are like this faithful remnant that she represents.  The culture around us that we used to could call Christian started going secular in the 60’s and now has largely gone pagan.  People with spiritual experiences and ideas about God abound.  “Spiritual but not religious” is a predominant attitude.  We can’t call our culture Christian anymore.  Indeed, anything that looks like institutional Christianity is suspect or scorned.  There are big forms of Christianity out there, the mega-church phenomena, but you have to watch them and ask where the mega-money coming in goes.  Are they really doing anything to eradicate poverty, clean-up neighbourhoods, or get people back on their feet.  Or, are they just getting filthy rich offering spiritual opium to a multitude that suffers existential angst for having gotten lost and grown obese from worshipping the false gods of money, sex, and power.  We, the remnant, may look old and barren but we still got Jesus and the voice of the prophet leaping in our bellies that points to him.  We’ve got Truth.

I want to tell you something about Mary, the fifteen-year-old young woman standing outside our doors pregnant with what’s coming.  Let’s not write her off, amen?  Who is she?  How about a little family history?  The Baby Boomers left the church in the 60’s.   Those that stayed gave the church its last 1950’s–style heyday in the 80’s.  A good many of the Boomers wanted their children to be able to decide for themselves about matters of faith so they dropped them off at church programs for children.  When those children reached their teens they did not stay with the church because it wasn’t a family thing for them and, let’s face it, we only segregated them inside these walls with our children and youth programs. and didn't get to know them.  Then these children of the Boomers started to have children in the late 80’s and early 90’s and saw no need to take them to church.  A generation more or less lost?  Now these very un-churched, secularized, well-gadgetted, social media addicted grandchildren of the Boomers are having children.  The oldest of which would be the 15-year-old young woman outside our door pregnant with what’s coming. 

So what is coming?  Well, whatever it is won’t be coming here.  It just won’t and we have got to accept that and change.  We have to go out there and really be like Jesus whom we know and worship in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit.  We have to get out there and really be the family of God.  I emphasize family here because a lot to most of these young folks are wanting for family, family like Elizabeth and Mary.  Elizabeth didn’t judge Mary for her predicament.  She called Mary blessed and herself blessed to be in Mary’s presence because Jesus was there growing in her.  So also with the children and youth who are out there.  We need to be calling them blessed and counting ourselves blessed to be in their lives. 
            One of the most astonishing social realities happening right now is young people awakening to and responding to Jesus and even taking spiritual leadership in their homes.  “and a little child shall lead them” so goes the Scripture.  Let me give you an example.  A couple of weeks ago I was up at the hospital and I went into the chaplain’s office to get my free-parking-clergy-perk-ticket.  While I was talking to Patti, the hub-meistress, a young boy maybe fifteen came in.  He asked for a rosary.  He said his friend told him he could get one their.  Patti got him one and asked if he knew what it was for and if not she’d help.  He thanked her and left.  Friends, I hope you’re feeling a leaping in your bellies.  Something really wonderful is going on out there.  Go find it and bless them and be blessed.  Amen.

Drawing Water from the Well of Salvation

Isaiah 12:1-6

“With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.”  To me verse three here is one of the most beautiful verses of Scripture there is.  There is just so much tucked away in it.  I’m a bit at a loss as to where to start.  So I’ll start with saying who it is written to. 

In 586 BCE the Lord God of the Israelites, Yahweh, decided he had had enough with the wickedness of his people.  They were idolatrous to the point of their kings sacrificing their firstborn sons to other gods by burning them in fire in order to have power.  They were idolatrous to the point of feasting all the time.  The rich were getting richer by abusing the poor and taking all they could to themselves.  The temple in Jerusalem was nothing more than a sham symbol of status. 

The Israelites simply were not being the people that Yahweh had delivered them out of slavery in Egypt to be.  They weren’t the people who by living according to the Commandments they would be a loving community who visibly reflected the very nature of the one true God Yahweh to the nations.  There wasn’t peace in their midst.  Instead, they just looked like one more of the nations and a wicked one at that.  So, Yahweh finally put his foot down (finally because this had been going on for a couple of centuries) and he sent the Babylonians and they destroyed Jerusalem and levelled the temple and carried off into exile anybody who was anybody. 

The Babylonians took them back to Babylon where most of them grew quite comfortable, except for a small remnant who just couldn’t shake the desire to return to the Land, who couldn’t help but to believe the prophets through whom Yahweh was promising that he was going to bring them back to Judea, to Jerusalem, and they would rebuild.  It is to this small, faithful remnant that Isaiah here writes and tells them that the day is coming when they will go back and when they do they will make a public confession shouting aloud with great joy their thanks and praise because God has not just saved them but has himself become their salvation.  Yahweh the Holy One of Israel himself will be in their midst comforting them.  They will say “Surely God is my salvation. I will trust and not be afraid.  The LORD, the LORD himself is my strength and my defence.  He has become my salvation.”

God himself is our salvation.  That is a pretty deep thing to say.  Salvation is probably the most misunderstood and offensively used word in the Christian arsenal of snobnoxery.  Coming from the Southern Bible belt in the US I grew up with the idea that salvation was simply that God has given a “Get Out of Hell Free” card to those who had the smarts enough to take the advice to believe in Jesus, come to church, and live good.  I don’t know what you folks have been taught, but what I grew up believing was salvation isn’t what the Bible teaches and especially not what the Old Testament teaches.  Isaiah here saying “Surely God is my salvation” he surely has no concept at all of going to Hell when he dies because he is a sinner and therefore God has saved him from that.  There is no Hell in the Hebrew vocabulary.  There is a place called Sheol where the dead are held but it is not the fiery place of torment you find in Dante’s Inferno.  The concept just is not there.

Salvation to Isaiah and his hearers was God acting in history in the actual events of their lives to save his people from circumstances that are oppressive and unbecoming of the people of God.  It is deliverance right in the now not an after life thing.  Salvation is what happens when God restores his people to a right relationship with himself.  In the case here in Isaiah, salvation would be God bringing his people back from exile in Babylon to the Land he promised them free of external oppressors where they would be free to live as his people.  In the bigger picture salvation is a relationship of trust in and commitment to God lived out in a community of people that is a response to God’s faithfulness.  Salvation is when God has created a community of people on Earth who live together in such a way as to truly reflect his image.  I know I’m getting deep her so I’ll back off with saying this; we need to stop thinking of salvation as an after life event and start thinking of it in terms of what Jesus is doing here in our midst which is in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit he is making this little small church out in Hobokkenville to be a communion of people who love one another as selflessly as he has loved us each and given his life for us.

Let’s get back to Isaiah.  Isaiah compares salvation to a well from which we will joyfully draw water.  Let’s try to picture this image.  The word for “well” can mean a springhead or any source of water that bubbles up from in the ground.  We will draw from the source, the sprenghead of salvation.  And what is water out there in the desert?  Between Babylon and Jerusalem is a whole lot of barren, rocky, dry wasteland.  There’s no rivers or ponds or anything like that.  For the people who live there water is nothing short of the source of life itself.  It’s that powerful of an image.  No water, no life.  You die…unless you eat the leaves of the Acacia tree like camels do.  Trying to live in that kind of desert wilderness is extremely difficult.  You need a source of water.  Such is life.

So Isaiah is here creating an image of being in a wasteland and finding an unexpected source of water.  With joy we will draw life from the very source of life and its salvation.  And he says this is what God is for us.  He says God has become my salvation.  God himself, his presence with us each is the deep well of salvation from which we draw life.  This verse just gobsmacks me with its straightforward simplicity on where to find true, indeed, eternal life if I can through Apostle John in here.  At 17:3 of his Gospel he says that eternal life is not going to heaven when you die but rather knowing God and the one he has sent; Jesus.

Let me do a little word play with the Hebrew word for “salvation” that is neither here nor there but…  The word itself is Yeshua or Joshua as we would say in English.  If you remember Joshua was the one who led the Israelites into the Promised Land.  Isaiah may quite literally be telling this about to return to the Land remnant of faithful Israelites that God himself is their Joshua rather than their salvation.  But that’s a topic for another day.  The Greek way of saying the name Yeshua or Joshua is Jesus.  Jesus’ name quite literally means salvation. 

Now, I’m not going to be the first to go looking for Jesus in the Old Testament.  The early church did this “religiously”.  But, it is not a stretch for us to look at what Isaiah is saying here to this about to return to the Land faithful remnant of Israelites in exile in Babylon and read a little Jesus into it so that it says to us: “Surely God is my Jesus; I will trust and not be afraid.  The LORD, the LORD himself is my strength and my defence; he has become my Jesus.  With joy we can draw water from the wells of Jesus.”

Jesus is salvation.  If we are looking for a source of life apart from our relationship with him in and through the Holy Spirit, a relationship in which we share his very relationship with God the Father, then we are mining for fool’s gold and not drinking the living water.

Let me close with saying a word about drawing the water.  We have to put some effort into this.  We have to draw the water to be able to drink it.  Too many Christians go about their faith life just dancing around the well in the desert and never drinking the water.  We Presbyterians, we’re real good at not even dancing around the well.  We just say, “Yeah, there’s a well there, but it’s our duty to keep walking or we’ll never get to the Promised Land.”  We can do churchy things, things we believe its our duty to do for “the church” and all the while not be drinking the living water of Jesus in prayer and Bible study with each other.  We need to draw the water and drink it.  Developing a deep prayer life, meeting together to pray for one another and to study the Bible together and of course eating.  These are how we draw from the well of salvation…and there’s a joy in it, you know.  With joy we will draw that water.

Jesus, our salvation, is with us.  We are bound to him in the Holy Spirit whom he has sent to live in us.  Pull out your Bibles and read them at home and talk about what you’re discovering there.  There’s not a one of us too old or too you or too important to do that.  Draw from the well of salvation, from Jesus and joy will come.  Amen. 

Tea: The Forgotten Sacrament

Philippians 1:3-11

The Trinity has begun a good work in us which he will bring to completion.  This good work is the Incarnation of God the Son as Jesus the Messiah of the Jews who is Lord and Saviour of all Creation.  Paul in Ephesians 1 said that this was the plan that God had from before creation to bring all things under one head, to unite all things in Christ.  At the very conception of this baby, God united himself not only to humanity but to even physical matter, the creation.  The Incarnation has bigger effect than just on us.

The early church Fathers thought about the Incarnation differently than we are accustomed.  They emphasized that the Incarnation was for healing.  As Jesus the Trinity has infused humanity with his very self and has thusly changed humanity, a change that includes healing humanity of sin and death.  I used to say that by the incarnation God infected humanity with his very self and reversed the infection that humanity suffers due to sin which culminates in death pervading throughout the creation.  I used to use that infection metaphor but a man in my last church said that’s not a helpful word and suggested the idea of infusion was better.  With infection a virus gets into something and grows exponentially until it either kills its host or implodes and dies.  Humanity looks like a virus on earth.  The human population is growing exponentially and destroying its host.  That’s not quite the way God is working in us. 

Infusion is a better metaphor for the Incarnation.  It is the process of how we make tea.  A tea bag is placed into hot water and the tea begins to permeate the water and we have tea.  So also by Incarnation God has infused his very self into the creation particularly humanity and now by the continued working of the Holy Spirit the permeation continues and will continue until its completion when Jesus returns and as Isaiah prophecies at 11:9 that “the earth will be full of the knowledge of God as the waters covers the sea.”

Now, we’re not done with the tea metaphor yet.  Tea bags have medicinal properties as well.  If you take a moist tea bag and place it on an infected wound it will draw out the infection.  This is called expiation.  Expiation is the other side of the incarnation.  Jesus draws the sin of humanity, our infection, our disease, our impurity into himself like the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement and bears it away unto death, his death on the cross.  He expiates us of sin.  He heals us.  He unburdens us of our.  This is what forgiveness is.

By the gift of God the Holy Spirit coming to live in us we are the body of Christ bound to Jesus our head and he is permeating us with the new life of his resurrected humanity and this has the effect of expiating, of healing us of our sin and death, a healing that will come to its fruition on the day when he returns and we are also raised from the dead.  But anyway, this is just a little something for you to think about the next time you are enjoying a cup of tea hopefully with others because that just makes the metaphor complete.  Amen.